


Backstage 15 - Each Proud Division

by Aadler



Series: Backstage Stories [15]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-12
Updated: 2011-03-12
Packaged: 2017-10-16 21:29:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/169544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aadler/pseuds/Aadler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Quadruple your fun, and then try to sort it out …</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

  
**Banner by[SRoni](http://sroni.livejournal.com)**

**Each Proud Division**  
by Aadler  
**Copyright September 2003**

* * *

Disclaimer: Characters from _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

There had been little time for planning and none for practice, but the raid began smoothly all the same. Tara blew the gates with a spell she and Jonathan had worked out — he didn’t have that kind of power, while her magicks were deeper but gentler, but the ease and effectiveness of their collaboration had surprised them both — and the two Slayers were inside and boiling through the guard post while the echoes of the detonation still reverberated through the caverns behind them. The interior courtyard was cleared within seconds, at which point Cordelia sheathed the yellow-green-spattered claymore and fell back to cover Tara, while Joyce forged ahead through the fortress corridors with a double-bladed axe. It was a woefully uneven match on a physical level: there were hundreds of the ratlike Ptarmiiki, and they attacked with the heedless ferocity of a hive mind, but none was taller than three feet and their weapons were all flint-tipped wood; the single Kevlar vest Jonathan had been able to procure (don’t ask) was more than adequate to protect Joyce’s torso, and the axe tore through wooden shafts and furry bodies with equal celerity. Tara, with Cordelia’s protection, was able to follow Joyce at a fast walk, maintaining a steady chant all the while. Mystical energies flared and sizzled in pyrotechnic splendor against the shield provided by the chant, and Cordelia loosed an occasional arrow from the compound bow, covering Joyce’s flanks and watching for surprises while she protected Tara and herself.

“Every time somebody uses this line in a movie, I want to give them such a smack,” Cordelia noted conversationally. “But I have to say it anyhow: people, this is too easy.”

 _Speak for yourself!_ , Tara thought but couldn’t spare a moment to say. Joyce simply kept pressing the advance, chopping and slashing with tireless fury. Every time the stream of reinforcements increased, she redoubled the force and savagery of her assault, looking for all the world like the Frazetta cover art for some feminist Conan, and leaving an unbroken trail of bloody, smashed bodies. (Not blood, actually; whatever comprised the Ptarmiiki’s circulatory fluid was almost exactly the same color as antifreeze. That, and the recognition that these weren’t truly intelligent creatures, were all that made it possible for Tara to bear such a slaughter.)

Most of the bristly warriors understandably treated Joyce as the main threat, but every now and then a smaller group would charge the two women following. One such did so now, and Cordelia dropped all three of them (nockdrawloose, nockdrawloose, nockdrawloose) while she continued her earlier train of commentary. “Oh, sure, this creepoid swarm is certainly icky enough, and the whole underground-ant-farm thing just cries out for a giant can of RAID —” (nockdrawloose, and a Ptarmiiki that might or might not have been able to take Joyce in a rear strike fell screeching and thrashing) “— but there’s nothing here that really calls for _two_ Slayers. I mean, overkill much?”

Joyce cut through the last of the horde facing her, and for a moment there were no more scrambling to replenish the inner defenses. “You’re talking to yourself,” she said to Cordelia. “ _She_ can’t stop the chant long enough to answer you, and I …” She brushed back from her face a clump of hair matted with demon gore. “I don’t care enough.”

Cordelia sniffed. “Quick tip, Momzilla: once you pass a certain age, PMS just starts to come across as crabbiness.”

Ignoring her, Joyce said to Tara, “These interior gates should be the last barrier between us and the queen. Can we do without the shield long enough for you to summon another of those breaching spells?”

“Puh- _leeze,_ ” Cordelia said. “Granted, this expedition desperately needed a fashion presence, but that’s not all I’m good for. Hold this.” She tossed the bow and quiver to Joyce, and drew the sledgehammer from the sling she had rigged across her back. She hefted it, took a stance before the gates, and paused to tilt a challenging eyebrow at Joyce. “Sure you know which end goes where?”

“I’ll work it out.” The older woman nocked an arrow with casual ease. “Although I don’t doubt that you’ve handled many, many more shafts than I have.”

Tara stumbled in the chant — for a second she was afraid she would choke — and Cordelia stood for a frozen moment before producing a tight, dangerous smile. “It’s not the number that counts,” she murmured. “It’s the quality. Stand clear!”

The brunette Slayer had compared the subterranean warren to an ant farm, but Tara knew that the Ptarmiiki were more like termites: while their constructions were elaborate and impressive in their detail, the materials and techniques were primitive. The gates they faced were stone and wood interlocked with mindless ingenuity and cemented with hardened secretions from the worker drones; even a normal, strong man could have battered them down in twenty minutes of determined work. It took Cordelia three swings, the last one shattering the crossbar on the far side with a boom almost the equal of the spell that had gained them their initial entry.

A fresh wave of Ptarmiiki erupted from the sundered gates, and Tara felt a stab of fear: too many, too fast, and neither of the Slayers was armed for a mass assault! Cordelia smashed half a dozen with the sledgehammer before the other two women realized that Joyce was simply walking through the swarm, disregarding them as they streamed past her. “Workers,” Joyce said dismissively, not even bothering to look back. “Save your effort for where it matters.”

Inside, the remaining warriors had gathered in a protective ring around the queen. It was the probing of her sensing spells that had sparked and coruscated against the field Tara had worked to maintain (though she had allowed the Slayers to believe she was shielding them from more aggressive enchantments), but now the pressure of the queen’s awareness began to reach the level of actual threat. Tara forced more determination into her voice, more power into the chant, and Cordelia said, “Only a few dozen left, this shouldn’t be too hard —”

Joyce knocked her from her feet with a clothesline sweep of her arm, and was diving for Tara in the same second. They went down together, Tara losing her breath and her concentration as she hit the packed earth of the chamber floor, Joyce twisting on impact to draw and loose from her back, and something went past them with a chittering shriek to slam into the broken gate.

Tara sucked in air, frantically snatching for the scattering threads of the chant, the force of the queen’s alien consciousness looming over her like a gathering wave. Even surprised and in the clutch of near-panic, a dry detached corner of her mind realized what was happening: the consorts, the queen had sent the winged consorts to the upper reaches of the inner chamber, and Joyce had glimpsed one of them swooping down in an unexpected attack from above.

Then the shock of the moment had passed, and they were moving again, Joyce loosing two more arrows and Cordelia coming to her feet to hurl the sledgehammer at the queen (she missed, but two warriors were crushed) before snatching out the claymore and meeting the final charge in a slashing whirlwind of focused ferocity. Tara was the last one to rise, both because she was slower and weaker and because her contribution didn’t require her to be standing, and her voice steadied and grew sure as the power of the chant and her own mental discipline beat back the oppressive domination of the queen’s awareness.

Without planning it, the two Slayers had switched roles, and with what small attention she could spare, Tara felt a dim surprise at seeing that they operated in much the same way. Joyce drew and released with the same relaxed skill Cordelia had shown, transfixing the consorts in mid-flight before they had any hope of coming in close enough to use the deadly barbed tails, then switching her aim to the warriors on the ground; Cordelia, for all her earlier banter, sheared through the fighters around her with the same awful lightning fury with which Joyce had wielded the axe. Two different women, with two different backgrounds, from two different corners of reality; but, perhaps, the things that drove them weren’t quite so different as it had seemed …

It ended even as she watched, the last warriors falling to sword and arrow, and Cordelia stalked toward the queen with the dripping claymore held steady. Larger than its mindless servants, the monarch stood as tall as the women and might possibly have weighed as much; trapped, shorn of its defenders, it drew itself up in the last extremity of desperation. Tara cried out, too late, as the retractable venomed talons shot forward, but Cordelia cut them away with a negligent backhand stroke before they could touch her, and a fifth of a second later the queen’s head was bouncing in the opposite direction.

The former prom princess glared down at her foreshortened adversary for one more moment; then, as if becoming aware of the other eyes on her, she turned back to her companions. “So, are we done now?” she asked. “Can we go now?”

“Almost.” Joyce looked to Tara. “The males, right? The ones I shot down?”

Tara nodded. “Any w-w-one of them.”

Joyce drew a dagger from a belted sheath, and moved to one of the fallen consorts. One quick stroke to open the dorsal space, another the length of the prehensile tail, and several smaller cuts to sever the connections, and Joyce held up one of the terminal barbs, still attached to its poison sac and dripping with yellow-green fluid. “Good thing we didn’t need something delicate, like the thymus,” she observed. “I’m not up on my demon dissection.”

Tara produced a ziplock bag, and the extracted organ was sealed in and stored away. “That’s it,” she said. “We can g-g-g–” She stopped, swallowed. “We can go.”

It was wrong, so wrong, to feel this self-conscious around Joyce. But this wasn’t Joyce, no matter how much she might wish it. The three women started the march that would retrace their route and take them back to the surface. Cordelia’s chirpy travelogue seemed to have dried up for now; lacking the body armor Joyce wore, she had taken damage to the stylish blouse she had for whatever reason chosen for Slayerwear, and it was clear that this bothered her considerably more than did the small wounds that accompanied the damage. Neon ooze blotched the frilled fabric and streaked her hair, and blood stained the edges of cuts in the material, though the cuts in the underlying flesh had long since closed. She walked with the air of one daring any onlookers to make a comment. When none came, she looked to Joyce and said, “Well, it seems you do still know how to handle a shaft.”

Without glancing back or breaking stride, Joyce replied, “And you still have us covered as far as fashion presence is concerned.”

Tara, between them, didn’t know if this was blossoming camaraderie or the first foundations of blood enmity. She had kept up her part in the raid — in directing it, if it came to that — but dealing with two strange Slayers was a problem of a different level of complexity.

She wondered if Jonathan was having as hard a time as she was.

*                    *                    *

There was, Jonathan was positive, absolutely no way Tara could be having as hard a time at this as he was.

Procedurally, the op was moving like a dream. The sensing spell Tara had taught him worked perfectly, tossing up a light show every time one of the vampires crossed the edge of the field; the flash caught the eye, making a stealthy approach impossible, and the effect reinforced the spin he’d given the two Slayers, that this particular vampire brood was mystically charged and he, Jonathan, was nullifying their auras so they could be killed by conventional means. More than that, both women stuck to the plan, mirror-Buffy taking out the vamps with stake and saber and crossbow while the eerily adult Dawn stayed by his side, the long lace sleeves of the tattered Goth dress concealing spring-driven wooden daggers for any stragglers or independent thinkers. Mirror-Buffy fought with passionless competence, making her probably less effective in the spearhead position than her older, more experienced mirror-sister would have been; Dawn, however, was almost certainly the better guardian for an all-too-vulnerable budding warlock, showing considerably more interest in the task than Jonathan could imagine Buffy ( _mirror_ -Buffy, he reminded himself again) ever feeling.

No, the problem wasn’t in the execution. The problem was that he was scared.

He would so much have preferred to face the hive-rats; they were vicious and carnivorous and there were a  _lot_ of them, but vampires … vampires were worse. The intelligence in their eyes when they attacked made it clear that they wanted _him,_ turning danger into something personal. Even though there couldn’t be more than a dozen of them, the supernatural menace they exuded sparked a fear deeper than he could ever have felt for a swarm of little furry demons. Only the lethal skill of his protector, and the necessity of preserving the Slayers’ trust in him, made him able to keep moving, keep chanting, keep notrunning and notscreaming and notpeeing himself.

No, it couldn’t be this hard for Tara. She had true power instead of just clever tricks, and she’d dealt with this … _stuff_ … more than he had. Most of all, though, she was real; she was a genuine good guy, one of the actual Scoobies, and he was an arch-villain masquerading as a hero. (Like when Lex Luthor was the champion of that planet that thought Superman was a villain, before the Multiverse rearranged everything, or when Baron Zemo’s son got new names and costumes for a bunch of super-criminals and created the Thunderbolts, only most of them wound up actually trying to _be_ heroes …)

Dawn staked a charging vamp in mid-leap, so close the crumbling fingers almost touched Jonathan’s throat before falling into dust around his sneakers. He faltered in the chant and stumbled in his advance, but Dawn’s hand on his elbow steadied him, and he recovered himself as the two of them continued to follow the scarred, jaded mirror-Buffy. “You’re doing fine,” she reassured him. “There can’t be more than a few of them left.”

So she knew; knew, at least, that he was terrified, but somehow didn’t seem to think less of him for it. In a way he couldn’t have hoped to explain, that made him even more ashamed. She _believed_ in him. Why? Why would she do that?

“Last one,” mirror-Buffy announced. “At least, that’s all I see.” She looked back to the other two. “Good job, Justin. You just keep up that hexin’, I’ll handle the sweat-work. So where’s this amulet that makes these guys so hyper?”

He stopped the chant; with all opposition gone, it didn’t really matter now, and things were about to get a lot trickier. Still, “It’s _Jonathan,_ ” he told her. “I’m the Sorcerer Supreme of this realm, not some feminized pre-adolescent lip-syncher. You need me just as much as I need you, don’t forget that.”

“Whatever,” mirror-Buffy returned, plainly (or ostentatiously) unimpressed. “Just tell me where to go and what to kill, we’ll be best pals. Gee, we can even do each other’s hair —!”

“Jump,” Dawn interjected, not even raising her voice, but mirror-Buffy had already thrown herself forward in a diving roll, and was coming to her feet as the overstuffed armchair crashed into the spot where she had stood. Jonathan hadn’t even seen it until the warning was already spoken, but the smaller Slayer must have heard it passing through the air above her; or maybe there was some kind of psychic Slayer forewarning, like a spider-sense …

“All _right!_ ” mirror-Buffy cried with revolting cheerfulness, and a parahuman leap carried her past a stretch of broken stairway and clear to the second floor landing of the condemned apartment building where the brood had made its nest. Crashes and snarls and sounds of fists slamming into flesh attested that she had found a fresh supply of opponents, and Jonathan started forward to peer upstairs, hoping to see part of the battle … but a hand in his collar yanked him back, Dawn, and an instant later she had swept his feet from under him, slowing his fall with the hand that still gripped him, and he landed on his back with almost no force as shadowy figures dropped from above to alight around them.

“Stay there,” she ordered, and he was only too happy to comply. Three vampires ringed them, demon faces to the fore; beside him, Dawn stood in an odd slanting half-crouch, both stakes out, and she revolved slowly to keep one and then another in the edge of her vision. “So, here we are,” she said, still maintaining that slow turning radius. “Who wants the first dance?”

In contrast to mirror-Buffy’s alternating boredom and enthusiasm, Dawn’s voice held a kind of detached interest. Something about it seemed to unnerve the trio around her, for they hesitated, and one of them sounded doubtful as he said, “ _She_ ain’t the Slayer …”

“No, she’s not,” another said with over-forced authority. “The Slayer is upstairs, and even if the others can’t take her, they’ll keep her occupied for a bit. This one, she’s bluffing.”

Dawn said nothing, only smiling with what seemed to be real pleasure and amusement, and continued to turn, steadily and serenely.

“She’s not bluffing,” the third one said. “I’d smell it if she was afraid. Boys, I don’t like this —”

“Oh, come _on_.” The smile was gone, and she raked them with scornful eyes. “Three big, bad demons, and one poor, weak woman, and you have to build up your nerve? I’m a  _victim,_ people. I’ve just got these little pointy wood things and you’re all strong and slavering and ferocious, do I have to spell it out for you? Kill me, kill him, snack and run while your buddies get chopped up by the Slayer upstairs, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Doesn’t _anybody_ want their teeth in this virgin neck —?”

Jonathan blinked just before it happened, so his eyes were open for the beginning, otherwise he would never have been able to track the action. Even so, he wasn’t entirely sure what he had seen. She moved so quickly that he couldn’t tell if she had begun before her adversaries or outraced them the moment one of them started to act. Two of the three were already beginning to shift to dust when she passed above him in a flat lateral leap (just like Bong Soo Han doubling for Tom Laughlin in _Billy Jack_ ), to pierce the heart of the last one with an extension that seemed to stretch into infinity. Dawn held the thrust for an extra second, then let her arm fall, and a long shudder ran through her.

She boosted him up one-handed, and her smile was shaky as she faced him from a distance of inches. “Wasn’t sure I could take them all and cover you at the same time,” she murmured tremulously. “But you played it like a champ, I should have known I could count on you. It’s just like I remember, you and me … God, I’ve missed you so much!” And while he was still trying to process that, she hugged him with an impetuous fierceness that would have taken his breath away even if her arms _hadn’t_ threatened to collapse his rib cage.

Mirror-Buffy’s voice floated down from the upper floor. “Are you two finished guarding the carpet down there? ’Cause I’ve laid out four or five more guys’ worth of dust up here, and somebody said there was this amulet thing we were supposed to find.”

Right, right. Jonathan eyed the broken stairs — no way he could get past that, one or another of the women would have to toss him across the gap like a medicine ball — and made a quick decision. “It’s this way,” he called up to her. “I can sense it ahead of us, down here and toward the back.”

She landed in front of them with the same lightness the vampires had shown, and Jonathan momentarily wondered how much of a link there might be between the undead and their supernaturally-appointed killers. “So, lead,” she said, shrugging. “You’re supposed to be the head hobbit, you and your stuttering girlfriend. Let’s get to it.”

Dawn’s eyes showed the same dismay Jonathan felt at the offhand callousness of her words; this Buffy was so different from the one (no, _ones_ ) they had known … not just hardened, but a little cruel. He gave the now-older little sister a reassuring smile that actually didn’t feel phony, and said, “Come on.”

He had a bad moment; the direction he had chosen took him to a stripped workshop, nothing remotely like the proper stage-setting, and pulling this off suddenly looked impossible. But, no, there, he saw a flat box tucked under the lowest shelf of a plywood work table, that would do it. He held up his right hand, palm forward, and swept it slowly from side to side like a metal detector working the vertical; following its apparent prompting, he moved to the table and went to one knee, using the movement to hide the withdrawal of the amulet from his jacket pocket, and pulled the box from underneath. Similarly, the “protective” incantation he uttered before opening the box set the subtle glamour in motion, and when he held up the amulet for the Slayers’ inspection, ominous light flickered across its surface while the smooth stone of the gem pulsed with an intermittent glow.

It looked pretty cool, Jonathan thought, but mirror-Buffy was either hard to impress or unwilling to show it. “That’s all?” she asked. “No butt-ugly statue to hang it on, no fancy altar, no demon guardian? Just shove it in a toolbox and stuff it under some junk?”

He didn’t have an answer ready, but Dawn moved to defend him. “Not all fiends have a flair for the dramatic. They’re still fiends.” And to Jonathan she added, “Good job. Mission accomplished and no surprises.”

Mirror-Buffy’s laugh was light and disdainful. “Yeah, give yourself a back-pat there, Jason, or maybe Donna here would rather do it for you. We cleaned out a vamp flophouse and found ourselves a nifty little nightlight. So, what do we do for an encore? What comes next?”

Right. What comes next. Like he had an answer for _that_.

*                    *                    *

Warren was slamming down coffee at a rate that had to be bad for the kidneys, and like most Type A personalities he got more abusive as he got more wired. Andrew didn’t entirely mind, but he knew to be wary. “Have you figured it out yet?” he asked, very carefully.

“No,” Warren said. “ _No_. It just doesn’t make sense. The readings don’t follow any kind of pattern, the resistance is still increasing even though the rate slowed once we dropped the wards …” He ran his fingers through hair subtly spiked in a way Andrew could never duplicate, no matter how he tried. “I’ll get it. I’ll find it. There’s a scientific explanation for this, and I’ll find it.”

Andrew wasn’t so sure. Even though they made a great team, Warren was the clear leader, his talent at manipulating the unconventional physics that emanated from _la boca del infierno_ bringing a much-needed discipline to Jonathan’s spell-casting contributions and Andrew’s own talent at exploiting the physiology of various demon species; but sometimes there _wasn’t_ a scientific explanation, not in Sunnydale, and Warren could get really huffy when the universe declined to match his picture of it. “Shouldn’t we, like, concentrate on finding a way to send them back? ’Cause you said they’re straining the, the dimensional constant just by all being here at the same time, and …”

Warren rounded on him with the ugly temper that was always gliding just under the surface. “Look, Tinky-Wink, have you spent much time working with tensor calculus? _Einstein_ used tensor calculus to organize his thinking, and that’s what I’m applying here. You don’t _get_ part of the answer and use it to pound the pegs into whatever slots are handy, you have to understand the whole problem before you’ve got any hope at a solution.” He clenched his hands together behind his head, as if he could force the answer to the front of his brain. “It’s here, I know it’s here. If I could just get these cosines to balance —!”

“What about finding the one who doesn’t belong?” Andrew insisted. “You said that was what messed everything up, so maybe you could, you know, get a hint if we could figure out which one is different.”

Warren threw his hands up, sending a stack of printouts fluttering down in a lackluster fall of confetti. “You see these? _You see these?_ They’re ALL different, every one of them is a misfit.” He recovered himself, sat back down, and started counting them off on his fingers. “Mrs. Summers is the only one who’s a mother. Dawn is the only one from the future, or _some_ future anyhow. Cordelia is the only one who doesn’t have Summers blood, at least not as far as we know. Buffy is the only one who’s never been to Sunnydale. Okay, next round. Cordelia is the only one who got involved with this Angel character, Buffy never met him and Dawn barely remembers him and Mrs. Summers didn’t even know he was a vampire. Dawn is the only one who knows all three of the others, but none of them know her. Mrs. Summers, unless Cordelia kicked it after she split for L.A., she’s the only one who isn’t actually alive now, here. Buffy, Buffy is the only one who _didn’t_ become the Slayer after Buffy Summers died.” He pounded his fists on the lab table. “They’re _all_ different! They’re all freaks! This is insane!”

Andrew could have pointed out that insane was the order of the day in this particular corner of Southern California, but right now didn’t seem the time for it. He waited, trying to think of some useful suggestion but mainly concerned with not making himself a target. “Even if you … I mean, once you get the answer, we might have trouble controlling them to make it work. Remember at the end of _the Final Frontier_ , where the big floating head has everybody convinced but all of a sudden Captain Kirk wants to know why God needs a starship?”

“Don’t mention that movie.” Warren sneered at the memory. “Shatner sucks even worse as a director than as an actor. But, yeah, you might have a point. We’ve got them jumping to our tune right now, but there’s no telling how bad Jonathan might screw up the scenario, or even if he plays it right one of them could have a hormone storm and go all mental. When we’re ready to reverse transport, we ought to have some way of … enforcing discipline, if we need it.” He regarded Andrew with sudden warmth. “Good going, Pink Ranger. Draw up some ideas while I keep massaging the math, I’ll give it a look next time I take a break. And make some more coffee, this stuff tastes like week-old _gahkkh_.”

He looked back to the desktop sheet he had covered with incomprehensible calculations, his lips moving and his eyes already looking into some invisible world. Andrew hurried to gather the ingredients for coffee, tingling with relief and determination and the warm satisfied glow of super-villainous fellowship. The lone arch-fiends — Thanos, Darkseid, Dr. Doom — had a solitary grandeur about them, but teams were always cooler, and he had just proven once again that Andrew Wells was a vital member of _this_ team!

Thinking of the coffee, he began to consider whether he could get away with bringing back decaf.

* * *

Further Credits: Joyce the Slayer is drawn from a previous story of mine, [_Point of Focus_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/75492/chapters/100380); ‘Mirror-Buffy’ is from the Third-season episode, “The Wish”; Cordelia the Slayer is from SRoni’s _[God Save the Queen](http://aadler.iwarp.com/2_syngsq.htm)_ ; and Dawn the Slayer corresponds to the character depicted in Brighid’s [_Beats a Cruel December_](http://www.allaboutspike.com/fic.html?id=483).


	2. Chapter 2

Tara opened the door before Jonathan could knock, and he stood outside with his hand still raised, blinking in surprise. “Come on in,” Tara said (here, tonight, she didn’t have to be cautious about an unguarded invitation). “Did you have any problems after you called me?”

“No, we’re fine.” He stepped inside, Dawn and the dead-eyed alternate Buffy immediately behind him. “I got nacho chips and Squeezers. How about you?”

“Celery sticks, spinach dip, and a cheese wheel. And to drink, there’s chamomile tea, Ginseng Rush, and … well, Diet Pepsi. You, you didn’t let them go into the store —?”

“We waited outside,” Dawn said. “We stayed to shadows, nobody saw us. It’s okay, we understand the situation.”

“Th-thank you.” Tara felt the hesitation force itself into her voice, and hated it. Buffy wasn’t the problem, this version of Buffy was one-dimensional and not at all intimidating outside a combat situation, it was like looking at a shadow of her friend. But Dawn, precious Dawnie, so pale and tall and _grown_  … “The others have already started, but there’s plenty for everybody.” Jonathan had ‘informed’ her, by cell phone, that they had found the amulet in the vampire hideaway, so she didn’t have to make a show of asking about it. “Just sit and relax for awhile, it’ll b-be a few hours before we have to start the next ph-ph-… The. Next. Phase.”

“Fine, whatever.” Buffy swept past her into the apartment kitchen. “Got any beer? I’m a warrior for the Powers of Good, I need my refreshment.”

Dawn stepped to follow her, paused at the doorway and looked back at Tara. “You and Willow have split?” she asked quietly.

“Yes,” Tara said. “Over a m-month ago.”

Dawn made a regretful mouth. “Misuse of magic?” This time Tara only nodded, unwilling to call on her traitorous tongue; Dawn sighed and said, “I’m sorry,” before continuing on into the kitchen.

“Weird, isn’t it?” Jonathan said.

“Familiar and strange at the same time.” Tara turned back to him. “And _sad_. I never knew Cordelia, but these others … Buffy might as well be a robot, Dawn looks like three months on a heroin binge, and Mrs. Summers won’t even let herself _look_ at this version of Buffy. It’s like _Waiting for Godot_ , but with that … Hellmouth twist.”

Jonathan looked blank for a moment, but covered it quickly. “I was thinking more _Dark Shadows_ , the alternate reality storylines. But I know what you mean.” His gaze turned toward the kitchen. “Cordy seems okay, and I never really dealt with Mrs. Summers before tonight, but this mirror-Buffy is definitely hard to get used to. Dawn … Dawn’s kinda nice.”

This, Tara decided, was about to go in an unproductive direction. “Do you remember that privacy spell we talked about?”

“Yeah, sure.” Jonathan smiled. “There’s a Latin version, you know, it might be better for this setup.”

Tara considered. “No, the Latin is stronger but I think the Greek is truer to nature. We don’t need secrecy, they’re not our enemies, I just want to talk for a minute. Okay, now remember, syncopation is the key …”

They spoke the invocation together, and nothing perceptible happened but she knew they had their speaking space. Jonathan either felt it also or took it on trust, because he began immediately. “Look, I really appreciate this …”

“I’m not doing it for you,” she reminded him. “You know that. It’s for them, and to keep Buffy from having to handle …” She inclined her head toward the kitchen where the four Slayers were doubtless dividing up the short-notice munchies.

“You’re right, I know that. But you _are_ helping me, I asked for help and you’re helping me. I, I can’t tell you what that means to me.”

“I think I understand,” she said. And it was true, she did.

Like her reaction to the foreign Slayers, the unpremeditated partnership with Jonathan was several contradictory things at once, incomprehensible and unwelcome on one level while being comfortable and natural and intuitively _right_ on another. A linear mind could never have reconciled the conflicts, and even her own background in sensing and following the multiple integrated balances of nature and supranature was only barely sufficient to keep her at equilibrium. The desperate sincerity of Jonathan’s appeal, though (he had pulled that monstrous tricked-out conversion van to a stop on the parking lot she was crossing and run calling her name) … Even if she hadn’t caught a glimpse of Dawn’s face through the partially-opened driver’s door, and _known_ that she couldn’t walk away from this, she wouldn’t have been able to disregard his need. He had gone terribly astray in his recent choices, but Tara could remember a time when she had thought the world of him (although, had she taken a moment to wonder, she would have been surprised to realize she couldn’t remember _why_ her opinion of him had been so high), and that kind of memory deserved some loyalty.

It hadn’t been unexpected to learn that Jonathan needed aid for more than just an other-worldly incarnation of Dawn, but three other Slayers — or even discovering that this Dawn was a Slayer herself — was a bit much to take on without warning. Still, they seemed to have kept it together until now. “You only had time to give me just the smallest outline before,” she told him. (She never stuttered when talking to Jonathan. It wasn’t the reason she was so favorably disposed toward him, but this ease and affinity of personalities, she sensed, both fell from the same source.) “I need all of it now. I’ll help you help them, but I have to know what’s behind it all. Okay?”

Jonathan glanced at the door to the kitchen. “That could take a while,” he said, defensive and reluctant. “What if they start to wonder what we’re talking about in here?”

“They won’t,” Tara said. Jonathan might have understood the basics of the privacy spell, but its source was Tara’s own soul. This was one of the first magicks she had ever learned, how to not be noticed when she didn’t want it, a wellspring that ran so deep she could, with preparation, extend it almost to the level of invisibility. “We need to keep track of them, but they’re not thinking about us now, don’t worry. So, how did they come here in the first place?”

Jonathan squirmed, but seemed to realize there was no avoiding it. “We kind of summoned them,” he admitted.

Tara nodded; no shock there. “Why?” That might be important.

“Well, it was sort of a, a research thing, a quest for deeper understanding. There’s, there’s a lot of power bound up in the Slayer essence —”

“Jonathan,” she said. “Don’t.” Not sternly, but with a finality no one could mistake. There was no time for face-saving evasions.

He flushed, looked around for an escape and found none, and said, “Okay, we called them here because we wanted _girlfriends_. Are you satisfied?”

She hadn’t expected that, but it didn’t surprise her. “Go on.”

The first admission made, he plunged on. “I mean, it was an experiment, you know? Whistle up some mystical females, keep them warded in — me and Warren figured that one out together — and use them for, like, practice. Lessons in how to get along with girls, only without the risk.”

“No risk?” Tara felt her eyes widen. “You were summoning, what? Female demons, you thought? No _risk?_ ”

Jonathan didn’t answer, he only looked back with mingled shame and defiance, as if the question might be embarrassing but the answer ridiculously obvious. Of course, Tara realized; this, at least, she could perfectly understand. There were risks, and there were risks; and how many times had _she_ felt that she would rather chance death than rejection? “All right, never mind. You called them, you had safeguards in place. But something went wrong.”

“Did it ever.” Jonathan shook his head. “There was some kind of feedback, was how Warren said it: light-burst like from a camera flash, zip of sound I thought was gonna blow my eardrums, and the mystical rebound … well, have you ever seen your own appendix? from the _inside?_ ” Again the shake of the head. “Warren started throwing switches and trying to stabilize the power draws, and I did this fast reinforcing spell, it wasn’t really meant for anything like that but a wizard has to be adaptable, and Andrew was yelling that this was wrong, the life-forces weren’t aligning with the diagram … that’s when I saw who they were. And then Warren looked up and said, ‘Four? We brought back _four?_ We’re not set up for four!’ ”

“Why —? Oh.” She sighed. “One for each of you.”

“Well, sure. And three of them were confused, but mirror-Buffy started trying to fight the wards, and Warren made up this story real fast about them having to stay inside the protective circles until they’d acclimatized to this dimension. ’Cause we could _see_ they weren’t from here, here Dawn is fifteen and Mrs. Summers is dead and Buffy … well, this just wasn’t Buffy.”

“All right, I understand. But what about this mission they think they’re on? I helped you carry out the scenarios you described to me, but I want to know why it was so important that they be kept occupied.”

“Well, it’s kinda complicated.” Even though his expression was hangdog, Jonathan’s voice betrayed actual pleasure at having something he could properly explain. “Warren kept juggling the power balances, and he’d pull me or Andrew off to the side to try this or that, and the women wanted to know what was going on, and whichever one of us was free, Warren told to come up with something to keep them satisfied …” He stopped, and the defensive look started to edge back into his eyes. “I came back and heard Andrew telling them that we were the heroes of this realm and they’d been summoned for a higher purpose, and I had to build on that. So I came up with an emergency mission, because I didn’t think they’d like our idea of what was a higher purpose, and Warren had already said we would have to drop the wards and get them away from the Lair, and I had a hunch who was going to be the one assigned to keep them busy. So I … well, I looked at the kinds of things _you_ guys do, and came up with a scenario like that.”

Something was happening in the kitchen, or getting ready to happen, Tara could hear a change in the voices there, so she rushed the next question. “Why did you have to keep them busy, why did they have to be gotten away from your … lair?”

“Warren said the resistance to the wards was undergoing an exponential increase. He said we had to close the wards, and separate the women from the source of the resistance, to give us time to work out what had gone wrong so we could send them back.” Jonathan must himself have heard the growing clamor in the kitchen, for he hurried to finish. “There being four of them, it’s twisted things all wrong, we only called three but there’s four, and we have to figure out which one doesn’t fit and null it out before we can send back the others, because the longer they stay here …” He looked to her with frightened eyes. “Warren said it’ll tear down walls between dimensions. Some kind of cascade effect, he said, everything being glopped in together. Chaos, anarchy, end-of-the-world stuff. That’s what he said.”

There was more, there had to be more, but they’d get to it when they could. Tara rescinded the spell and lunged for the kitchen, and crossed through the door just as Cordelia was saying, “Well, I don’t recall _asking_ for your opinion, Miss I’m-Too-Sexy-For-My-Lara-Croft-Braid —!”

“Is everything okay?” Tara broke in, and the four women at the table jerked in startlement, turning to stare at her. It was what she had wanted, to distract them from the brewing explosion, but still she felt her throat beginning to seize up at the awful fact of being the center of attention. “How’s the d-d– The dip?”

Buffy, the other Buffy, was first to recover from the mass surprise; yes, they had all — inexplicably, to themselves — forgotten about Tara and Jonathan until reminded. “Why, it’s just d-d-dandy,” she said. “But what about the b-b-b-beer I asked for, huh?”

The mockery was nothing new, but for it to come once again from someone with Buffy’s face was like being slapped; even Willow’s derision, while worse, wouldn’t have felt so _wrong_. Dawn opened her mouth and then closed it, biting her lip, and Joyce looked away with stony eyes. “See?” Cordelia said. “ _See?_ That’s what I’ve been dealing with ever since I got here, she just keeps on playing Bitch of the Century and these others won’t call her on it. Why are you two being such wimps?”

“Well, let’s see,” Buffy mused. “Could it be … oh, I dunno … force of habit, maybe?”

Tara made herself block out that alien disdain, and to Cordelia she said, “They s-saw her die. They both saw her die, and they d-d-don’t know how to cope.”

“Well, duh,” Cordelia responded grimly. “I saw her die, too, but when she came back she was a lot nicer than _this_. As for coping, I think a giant step in the right direction would be to knock out some of those little capped teeth.”

Buffy snorted. “You and what pep squad —?”

“Ladies,” Jonathan interrupted. “We have to focus here.”

That got their notice, and he seemed to wilt just a bit under their united scrutiny. “Focus on what?” Dawn said. “We completed the first phase, but you still haven’t told us what comes next.”

Jonathan looked to Tara, and somehow his need steadied her. Using him as an anchor (as she had done so many times with Willow, but there was a world of difference there), she said, “It’s not a straight-line progression.” Again they were all looking at her, but that was okay. “These things have to be understood, assimilated, lived as well as … performed.”

There were several seconds of silence, and Buffy for once spoke without the new, caustic scorn. “May I be the first to say, Huh?”

It was actually a fair response, because on one level Tara had produced an open-ended, near-meaningless statement intended to fill space and buy time. There was actually a real truth behind it, however, and while she was trying to find the words, Jonathan said, “I don’t always understand her, either. But she usually winds up making sense if I let her explain it.”

There, again the automatic ease of the unplanned partnership, and Tara slid smoothly into the opening he had given her. “What Jonathan means is that, even though we find ourselves dealing with a lot of the same issues sometimes, I don’t take the same approach or see things the same way as, as …”

“The Trio,” Jonathan supplied.

“Right. They try to find one kind of balance, between magic and science, but it’s still basically a rigid, masculine, goal-oriented thing. I look at it all from a softer, holistic, Gaia-centric perspective. Jonathan understands this better than the other two do, so he was willing to call on me. Together, we’re trying to, to bring together and meld the different elements of the situation, to find an internal balance before we go on.”

Jonathan smiled at her. Again, he understood: spontaneous gobbledygook that nonetheless carried a meaning they both could recognize and appreciate.

“I don’t know you,” Joyce said; it was, perhaps, the first word she had spoken since her daughter’s unwelcome duplicate had entered the apartment. “I dealt a little with Jonathan — my world’s Jonathan, that is — but I never met you at all. Even though I don’t have any reason to disbelieve you, we’re taking a lot on trust here, so if we have some spare time I’d like to find out a few things. Is that … acceptable … to everyone else?”

Tara nodded, wary but seeing no way around it, and the other women likewise indicated assent. The best she could do to preserve some initiative was to add a qualifier: “We’ll be needing to ask some questions, too, so that’s only fair.”

“All right.” Joyce turned in her seat to keep them all in her field of view, though she kept the main force of her attention on Tara. “The three boys said they were the protectors of this ‘realm’, which I took to mean they’re doing what they can to hold the line in Sunnydale. Is there no Slayer here?”

Tara saw Jonathan’s mouth tighten in alarm, and she drew a careful breath of her own. “The Slayer … she’s been through a lot the last few months. It hit her hard, and sh-she’s still recovering. Other people are trying to fill the gap —” (true, it was true, she wasn’t lying to them, even though it definitely wasn’t the Trio who were taking up any of the slack) “— while she has a chance to pull herself together.” She hesitated, but better to face it as quickly as possible. “Y-you should know: the Slayer is B-B-Buffy.”

It wasn’t as bad as she had feared; Cordelia looked unsurprised, and the scarred Buffy annoyed, while Joyce compressed her lips and Dawn … Dawn showed no response at all. “So,” Joyce said. “She doesn’t always die.”

“Correction,” Cordelia interjected. “She doesn’t always _stay_ dead. I brought mine back by CPR, even though she wasn’t a Slayer anymore after that. And like I said already, she’s miles ahead of you-know-who in the personality department.”

“That wouldn’t be difficult,” Joyce said.

“Excuse me,” Buffy said. “I’m sitting _right here_.”

A muscle twitched in Joyce’s cheek, but the older woman didn’t otherwise acknowledge the voice of her ‘daughter’. “This world’s Buffy is so traumatized that you had to call four Slayers from divergent realities to cover her normal duties? Because there’s something to what Cordelia said at the hive: this is overkill, none of the threats we’ve seen justify so much effort.”

Jonathan answered that, which was good; though she had said she would help him, it was hard for her to actively deceive these women. “You only saw the physical opposition,” Jonathan said. “We kept you insulated from mystical attacks, so the stuff you faced was more dangerous than you knew, and a  _lot_ more than we could have handled without you.”

Cordelia snorted. “So bring in Trauma Girl and the rest of the Slay Friends.” She looked around. “Wait, you do have Slay Friends here, right?”

“And there’s more,” Jonathan went on. “The things we split up into teams to go after, they weren’t the main issue. I mean, somebody had to take care of them, the hive-rats were multiplying like tribbles, and vampires, vampires are just _not_ good. But mainly, we went after them to steal their power so we could use it against the _real_ threat.”

Clearly he had meant that to sound dramatic, but it didn’t quite meet the bill; Buffy made a theatrical yawn and said, “Which is —?”

“We don’t know.” Tara spoke quickly to get in ahead of Jonathan; avoiding the truth was hard enough, she didn’t want to have to support or refute further lies. “There are portents, but … The thing is, th-there’s always something, at least once a year some single major menace rises up and t-tries to end the world. The thought was that if we m-moved quickly enough we could head it off before it g-g-g–” She had to stop; before knowing Willow she would already have fled, but two years of love and courage had given her resources to call on, and this had to be done. “Gathered. Strength,” she finished. “I wouldn’t have b-brought you here. If they’d asked me, I would have said it wasn’t a g-good idea. But you’re here, so we have to make it work as well as we can.”

“Well,” Cordelia said tartly. “Make _me_ feel special.”

Jonathan took it up again before Tara could respond. “Anyway, we got the amulet and the venom sac, and we have to let the moon reach its highest point tonight before we can do the bolstering ritual —”

Tara stopped him with her eyes. _We have to talk,_ she thought, and tried to communicate some of the same message to him, but for the moment there was another necessity. “Meanwhile,” she said, “there’s a problem.”

“What problem?” Dawn asked, more gently (Tara was sure) than any of the others would have said it. It was as if she was knowingly trying to help this along, which was a disturbing thought in itself. “Something to do with … this world’s Buffy?”

“No, not that.” It was easier now, because she had moved back to the truth. “One reason Jonathan called me was … The spell they used to summon you, something went wrong with it. There were only s-supposed to be three of you. Somehow a fourth one g-got in and that changed the balances, and Jonathan’s f-f-friends are trying to work out how to send you back when this is over.”

“Wait a minute.” Cordelia sat up straighter. “You brought us here without so much as a pretty-please, and _you don’t know how to send us back?_ ” Her vehemence was in pronounced contrast to the lack of reaction from the other three Slayers, and Tara wondered if their realities of origin were so awful that they didn’t mind the prospect of not being able to return. “What, did you buy your grimoires or whatever from the dump bins at B. Dalton?”

“Now, hold on,” Jonathan said, starting to flush red. “It wasn’t us that messed this up, there was some kind of mystical interference —”

“Never mind.” Joyce spoke with the measured calm of a teacher taking charge of an unruly classroom. “There’s a problem, you say, and I don’t think you told us just to make conversation. Is there something we can do about this?”

Tara drew what steadiness she could from the older woman’s firm control. “Maybe. We have some time, like Jonathan said, before we have to d-do anything else. I thought we might, might talk some, learn about each other, try to understand what m-m-might have happened.”

There was no horrified, stunned silence, but it didn’t seem to be a popular suggestion. “Wonderful,” Cordelia said. “Get-acquainted night on the Hellmouth. But, hey, does that mean we get to stick her underwear —” (indicating Buffy) “— in the freezer?”

Buffy shrugged. “Whatever fluffs your poodle. Only, shouldn’t you make some kind of little _ceremony_ over coming out of the closet —?”

“Uh, more nachos, anybody?” Jonathan said quickly.

With all the seeming tripwires of personality clash, it actually sorted itself out into some kind of reasonable order. Neither Joyce nor Dawn seemed able to cope with the offhand abrasiveness of the strange Buffy, but Joyce dealt by continuing to project that air of teacher-in-control, and Dawn by unresisting compliance with whatever Tara (or Joyce) asked; for her part, Cordelia had forgotten her earlier sparring with Joyce in the new antagonism with Buffy, and followed the program with the occasional complaint to make sure everyone knew she was being a team player even though she had been _seriously inconvenienced_ by this supernatural hijacking. Buffy herself didn’t refuse to participate, but it was clear that she hadn’t relinquished her prerogative to insult any or all of them on impulse.

The result, with many interruptions, distractions, arguments, side-tracks that had to be closed out and redirected, and warnings of imminent bodily harm, brought out a surprising array of facts about the assembled women.

Joyce was from November of 1998. Her daughter had died in her arms, and somehow the power of the Slayer had passed to her in that moment. In the aftermath of tragedy and discovery, she had sealed herself off from pleasure or sentiment or any other purpose; she was a warrior, nothing else, taking it as a given that she would fight until she died, and likewise assuming without dismay that her end would come sooner rather than later.

Cordelia was from May of 1998, and she too seemed to have drawn her power from the Buffy of her reality. Intrigued by the dark, enigmatic young man who had appeared in Sunnydale at the same time as the new girl, Cordelia had found herself involved with people she otherwise would have scorned, and the eclectic mix of ceaseless complaints and real courage had moved that world’s Angel to respond to her with successive consternation, amusement, respect, and finally an unexpected and almost despairing passion; so that, when the embattled Slayer had been drained and left to drown, it was Cordelia and Angel who had found her in the catacombs, and Cordelia who had inexplicably had the mantle of the Slayer transferred to her when she forced life back into Buffy’s lungs. Then had come the death of her father, and the disastrous night of her lovemaking with Angel, and now a demon with the face of her lover was her bitterest and most hated enemy.

Buffy, like Joyce, was from November of 1998. Her parents were dead, victims not of mystical forces but of the Los Angeles highway system. Her only living relative, an aunt in another state, had been in delicate health and unable to assume guardianship, so Buffy had gone through a revolving door of unsuccessful foster homes before being sponsored by a member of the Council of Watchers — a researcher, rather than a field mentor — who had spotted the potential in the angry, defiant girl and quietly provided her with education and training that had seemed pointless until the day she found herself able to break logs and dead-lift motorcycles; which event was itself only a little while before California, and then the whole country, started to slide down some giant hell-built toilet drain. No problem: it just meant that she got to do a whole lot of killing, and that was something she not only did well but was perhaps learning to enjoy.

Dawn was from August of 2010. She had seen Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia added to the U.S. flag, had seen three more Olympics cycles than any of the others, had seen two extra Presidents and one assassination, had seen the advent of holographic television and the first subdural digital processing implants, had seen Paul Rubens rule late-night television and Sharon Stone play Mrs. Robinson in a remake of _the Graduate_ (which she described as thoroughly pukesome). She had no active Watcher, she had no home, she went wherever there were rumors of mystical unrest and crushed whatever was causing it. She had been not quite fifteen when Buffy Summers died, and was now twenty-four, gaunt and deadly, with a porcelain complexion and eyes that were open wounds …

In her time with the Slayer’s retinue, Tara had learned that many seeming figures of speech were actually expressions of sober fact. In the right circumstances, your hair really did stand on end, you could truly be struck dumb with amazement or paralyzed by fear, the goosebumps on your arms would be so tight and hard they _hurt,_ and yes, your life did flash before your eyes. Now, listening to Dawn, she had another cliché added to the list of verified experience, for she felt a literal physical chill go down her spine as she realized this young woman had told her story in a way that made no mention of who she was. Daughter of Joyce, sister of Buffy, she had buried them both and now saw them re-embodied in persons who didn’t know her and never had (even this Cordelia had never heard of Dawn Summers), so she had simply withdrawn from them, not bothering to claim a kinship she knew would be denied. _Oh, Dawnie …!_

The exploration and revelations had brought much information and several surprises, but there had been nothing that resembled bonding. Of them all, perhaps only Cordelia might have been capable of it; the other three had been hurt too badly, had erected defenses too formidable for breaching. The variety of their origins and experiences had further sealed the inherent rifts between them; with so much in common, the differences still were seemingly insurmountable.

The first hint had come with the subject of Watchers. Cordelia had inherited Giles when she became a Slayer; Joyce, by her testimony, wasn’t considered a true Slayer and didn’t acknowledge Giles as her Watcher, but they worked together all the same; Dawn had already pronounced herself unaffiliated, but admitted to having known Giles.

Buffy was the only exception. “Nope, never heard of him. But then, I never had much to do with the big crumpet-dunkers in the head offices. Gwen says they’re embarrassed by us, ’cause they didn’t find me first, and they ignore us as much as they can in hopes that we’ll just go away —”

“Wait a minute.” Joyce looked to her alien daughter. “Gwen? Gwendolyn Post? _She’s_ your Watcher?”

Buffy returned the stare, aware as they all were of the disbelief — almost horror — radiating from the older woman, and visibly choosing from a menu of responses. “Well, I think of her more as a den mother with a dandy spell-book and lots of medieval weapons, but yeah, that’s basically the sitch. Why?”

“She’s … you’re not …” Joyce clenched her hands, fighting for control. “That’s unbelievable. I can’t believe that the Watchers, that _any_ Watchers would leave you in the custody of that horrible, horrible, horrible woman. It’s insane.”

“Oh, Gwennie’s not so bad.” The corners of the scarred mouth turned in a small smirk. “Got a little too much starch in her bloomers, and she’ll try to slide in a casual pass every now and then just to see if I’ve changed my mind, but …” Buffy stopped, eyes and smile going wider. “Oh, no. No, no, you’ve got to be kidding. You’re telling me _you_ fell for her routine —?” And she began to laugh. Joyce turned away, and did not thereafter acknowledge the other Slayer’s existence.

Worse was when Cordelia interrupted a comparison of the alternate chronologies to suddenly demand of Dawn, “What’s with the wrist?” The others halted in their discussion, and Cordelia pointed. “Those scars there, I don’t get that. I’ve been stabbed and sliced and impaled and even opened up with a crosscut saw, but Slayer healing always fixes me right up. How do you get scars?”

Dawn shifted in her chair, looking around uneasily at the other Slayers, and her free hand automatically went over the marked wrist. “They’re not from weapons,” she said at last. “They’re … supernatural in origin.”

“Oh.” Cordelia seemed intrigued. “Like some enchanted thorns, or serrated mandibles, or —?”

“No,” Joyce said. “They’re bites.” Dawn looked to her with insufficiently masked alarm, and Jonathan frowned, not understanding the tension rising in the room. Tara was afraid she did. “Vampire bites,” Joyce went on, her voice hardening into contempt. “Our metabolism can handle almost anything, but we’ll scar from vampire bites sometimes. Most of those are old, but at least one is still fresh. How do you keep getting bitten in the same place? How does that happen?” She stood, body set as if for an attack. “Is it bait? Is it a lure? Do you go trolling through the cemeteries at night, trailing your hand over new graves? No? I didn’t think so.”

“I don’t get it,” Jonathan said.

“Sh-she thinks it’s …” Tara had to stop to steady her breath; Joyce’s obvious growing rage was less frightening to her than what she saw in Dawn’s eyes. “There are stories of p-people who … let vampires bite them, voluntarily. For some kind of f-f-fulfillment. Pay them for it, sometimes. That’s what she thinks.”

Cordelia’s expression went from surprise to something very different, and the gaze she turned to Dawn measured her with pitiless appraisal. “So,” she observed coldly. “The Goth Princess has a little fang addiction. Or maybe this is just an erogenous zone the rest of us never thought of.”

“It’s not like that,” Dawn said.

“So what _is_ it like?” Cordelia spat, and, “Don’t!” Tara cried out. All eyes swung to her, and she went on insistently. “Don’t start. We can’t do this, we c-can’t afford it. You’re all stuck here together, and there’s no hope if you start f-fighting each other.”

They accepted that, but it was clear there would be no forgiveness. Now, or ever.

With Jonathan’s help, Tara kept subsequent conversation focused on possible causes of the current situation. It forestalled further clashes, but provided no answers. None of them knew of any enchantment or artificial influence that could have interposed them into the Trio’s summoning spell. None of them knew of anything about themselves that would make them a focus for disruptive forces. (Dawn held Tara’s eyes for an extra fraction of a second during that point in the discussion, and Tara understood; they both knew of Dawn’s extrahuman origin, but it wasn’t to be lightly shared with the others.) Cordelia had been contending with a chaotic alliance of Drusilla and Spike with the transformed Angel, but that alliance had recently been sundered, and in any event there was no evident way any of them could have effected her intrusion into the summoning, or reason to believe there was one, and none of the others were presently facing unusual (by Slayer standards) or recognizably pertinent threats.

There were no clear indicators, but the trends — both commonly and privately known — all seemed to shape toward Dawn as the anomaly. Tara could see that Dawn, too, was aware of this, and Jonathan’s constant attention to the second-oldest Slayer made Tara wonder if he suspected it as well. ‘Null it out,’ he had said of the uninvited fourth presence in the summoning; that did not sound promising, and Tara found herself more and more concerned about where this might be going.

Months ago, Buffy (‘their’ Buffy) had sacrificed herself to prevent the same kind of multidimensional convergence that seemed to be threatened now; but she had done it also to save Dawn, refusing — even before she had seen an alternative — to allow her sister to be the cost of the world’s survival. For all her relative lack of schooling in the intricacies of deeper magicks, this universe’s Buffy Summers had shown a consistent intuitive ability to make far-reaching decisions that turned out to be the best in the long run; and Tara, though she had grown up with magic, felt herself unqualified to deal with such momentous choices.

It was obvious that they were fast approaching a dead end, where all possibilities had been explored to their available limits without any conclusions being reached. The greatest contributions had been from Joyce’s maturity and focus and Dawn’s depth of experience as a Slayer, although the wild variety of Jonathan’s knowledge had opened up some avenues none of the others would have seen. Still, Tara could feel the exploration beginning to thump to a halt, and was starting to consider what they might do _instead,_ rather than next, when Jonathan’s cell phone rang.

He jumped, looking guilty — although, Tara decided, that could probably be read also as self-consciousness — and spent several clumsy seconds extracting the phone from its belt-clip carrying case. (Buffy’s lips formed words that might have been _nerd holster_.) All eyes on him and himself clearly aware of it, Jonathan flipped the phone open, turned his back with an apologetic grimace, and pushed the button for TALK. “Hello? — Yeah, we’re all together. — No, no problems. We’ve finished the first phases of The Program, and we’re planning strategy for the next step. — Uh-huh. — Right. Um, how’s it going on your end? — Okay. Okay. So, we hold tight for awhile? ’Cause that’s how we are right now. — Okay. Yeah. You got it. Out.”

“Breaking news from the Mad Scientists Club?” Cordelia said as Jonathan closed the phone and turned back to them. “I so need to hear that they have this mess straightened out, so we can all go home when your grand mission is finished.”

Jonathan got the uncertain expression that, Tara was learning, meant he was about to try and talk his way out of a corner. “Warren’s narrowing it down,” he reported. “He says he guarantees to have the answer by morning, which is still in the event window with half a day to spare. So we, we have time to relax a little before we go on to the next part of the mission.”

His eyes darted slightly as he said it, and Tara wondered how much was general nervousness and how much was from the strain of maintaining several lies at once. He couldn’t tell the Slayers the full truth about their summoning, but he — or Tara, acting alongside him — had told them of the complications in their arrival, which revelation in turn he had chosen to conceal from Warren. (Along with the fact of Tara’s involvement, though she was willing for that deception to continue.) Now he had to report back to his charges, but a different report from whatever Warren would have preferred. Life was difficult enough already; why did people have to make it more so?

 _We have to talk,_ she told him again with her eyes. Aloud she said, “All right. They’re working on that end, and they’ll d-do better if we leave them to it. We can b-be using the time to get ready, and to try and f-f-f– Find out some things for ourselves.” She held her hand out to Jonathan. “Could I use that? I think I know someone who might be able to give us some answers.”

She could see that Jonathan didn’t like it, but he couldn’t refuse with the others watching. “Are you sure?” he asked, giving her the phone. “Is this somebody you can trust?”

Tara considered it. “I think so,” she said. “You just have to know what to trust her _for_.”


	3. Chapter 3

< I’m still not sure this is a good idea, > Jonathan complained.

< It’ll be okay, > Tara assured him. < We’ve gone as far as we can on our own. We need another perspective, and she’s spoken of this kind of thing before. >

< That’s not what worries me. > Like Tara, Jonathan stood by the window, gazing silently out at the darkness, apparently lost in thought. < You know I’m not the most popular person with Buffy’s friends right now. If she tells them … >

< She won’t. At least, not right away, and we ought to have this settled by then. >

Actually, Tara wasn’t sure it would be a bad thing if Buffy _did_ find out; this was a serious matter, fully deserving of all the resources that could be arrayed against it. But, no. If Giles were still here, it would be a different matter; his formidable knowledge and experience would be a potent weapon against this convoluted threat. He was back in England, though, and the time frame was too narrow, and Willow — the next most effective in dealing with magic-based problems — still too precarious in her halting recovery from the spell-sequence that had turned ordinary abuse of magical forces into an actual addiction.

Even more than that, however, Tara felt somewhere deep in her being that this was something she and Jonathan were supposed to solve. She had learned to trust her impulses, to determine which ones sprang from a deeper source and to let those choose her path when they appeared, and her instincts were telling her now that her destiny and Jonathan’s were somehow intertwined. It wasn’t ego that led her to believe that fate had thrust this task on the two of them — a near-lifelong insecurity made her highly unlikely to seek any such self-aggrandizement — but a deeper sense that she was determined to follow.

< How much longer? > Jonathan asked again.

< She’ll be here when she’s here, > Tara answered. < I couldn’t make too big a deal of it, or she might have wondered what was going on. Don’t fret, there’s time. >

Forging the mental link had been only slightly more complex than setting the privacy spell, and in fact incorporated some of the same principles. This was nothing like the soul-communion she and Willow had once been able to share, and was both weaker and more elegant than the raw power blast Willow had sometimes used to mentally communicate with others; this was a simple, quiet channel between the two of them, allowing them to ‘speak’ without vocalization. It settled several problems at once: they could now communicate independently of both the collection of Slayers and the remainder of the Trio; Tara could guide and correct (and sometimes forestall) Jonathan in his dealings with the women; and they could more readily coordinate a course of action that, much as Tara disliked it, still depended on a great deal of concealment, evasion and misdirection.

< I really don’t like bringing her in on this, > Jonathan ‘said’ for perhaps the fifth time. < It’s just like when you took the hive-rats and made me invent a vampire amulet. You wanted to make sure I didn’t get anything I could actually use. We’re supposed to be in this together, but you don’t trust me. >

< I don’t trust the company you keep, > Tara shot back. < And, no, I won’t put anything into your hands that you could use against Buffy. And finally, we’re in this together because you _asked_ for help. I’m doing what I can, but I never said —  >

“Jeez, brooding much?” Both of them started as Cordelia’s voice broke in on their unvocalized argument. “Is this stare-fest going to go on much longer? Because if I can’t party _or_ go out and kill things, I’m going to start kicking down walls.”

“Oh, wow, sorry.” Jonathan tilted his head to look up at the former cheerleader. “I’ve got a D&D board in the van if you want me to —”

“Spare me.” Cordelia dismissed the suggestion with a wave. “I’d rather trade first-kiss reminiscences with Little Miss Peroxide in there. Which is to say _not_. Just tell me, how much longer are we going to be here?”

“We’re expecting someone in j-just a little bit,” Tara told her. “After we’ve talked with her, we might have a b-better idea what to do.”

Cordelia huffed and returned to the kitchen, passing Dawn with the stiffness of one pointedly ignoring something. < I’ll get back to you, > Tara told Jonathan, and a moment later she and Dawn were in the short hallway that led to bedroom and bathroom.

Tara had known from the other woman’s eyes that she wanted to talk, but for a long moment Dawn just stood looking back toward the kitchen. “She’s so young,” she said at last. “I was always a little afraid of Cordelia, but she’s so _young_ now. Even the other Buffy is older than her. I know it’s nuts, I’m looking at my dead mother and my dead sister, and what feels weird is Cordelia being younger than me.”

“Are you okay?” Tara asked.

“No. But that’s nothing new.” Dawn sighed. “It’s me, isn’t it?”

“We don’t know that,” Tara protested.

“Come on, let’s face it, I was never supposed to be here in the first place.” Her laugh was bitter. “I’m the second-oldest person here, and I’m only eleven years old. I was never born, I’m from a future that doesn’t even _exist_ in this world, the Watchers put out a contract on me with the Order of Taraka before Giles purged the Council …” She looked to Tara. “There’s more than you’ve admitted to the others, isn’t there? The problem that Jonathan’s friends are working on … it’s a lot more serious than just whether we can go back where we came from, isn’t it?”

Tara tried to soften it. “There are strains b-between the dimensions, because of the four of you being here. They need to balance it all out before it gets too bad.”

“Right.” Dawn looked away into nothing. “I’ve heard this song before, I know how the lyrics go.” She took a breath that seemed to hurt. “Buffy died instead of me, nine years ago. That should never have happened. Now the same thing is coming around again. This time I won’t dodge it.”

Her guilty memories had carried her directly to the worst possible assumption, and Tara couldn’t even tell her with authority that she was wrong. “Dawn … we don’t know. Wait until we know.”

The pale Slayer smiled, a dreadful thing to see. “You’re not going to tell me I shouldn’t think that way?”

Tara had no answer for that. For all its beauty and wonder, the world could be a harsh and terrible place, and the sad fact was that sometimes people _did_ have to sacrifice themselves for others. Buffy had done it, in her own reality and in Dawn’s; was her now-grown sister any less entitled to make such a choice? “So many things are different,” she said finally. “Between your world and mine. Maybe this is another difference. Maybe you’re not the Key to this one. If you are … But we don’t _know_ that you are, and this isn’t somewhere we can go with a guess. Promise me you won’t do anything … extreme … before we know for sure.”

Dawn studied Tara with an expression she couldn’t read. “When Willow moved out,” she said. “When it was just me and you in the house, with the Buffybot to keep up appearances … I’d lost everything, everybody. You were the only thing left in my life. I was crazy with guilt, I didn’t even want to live, but you wouldn’t let me do that to myself. You held me together, held _everything_ together. You saved me.” She sighed. “I worked up just the most awful crush on you.”

Tara felt her throat threaten to close. “Dawnie —”

“That’s what you said.” Dawn’s eyes locked with hers. “When I started to hint about how I felt, you sat down and took hold of my hands and said, ‘Dawnie — I’m not gay.’ And I’m looking at you like you just walloped me with Olaf’s hammer, and you said, ‘I’m not attracted to women. Or to men, either. It’s just not there for me.’ And I’m just totally flabbergasted, that’s a stupid word but that’s what I was, and I started to say something about Willow, and you said, ‘I love _Willow_. I’d do … I’d have done anything for her. But for you, this isn’t right.’ ”

At last Tara found her voice. “That wasn’t me.”

“I know. But it’s true, isn’t it? What you … what she told me?” Dawn peered intently at the other woman, then nodded. “Thought so. She was right, too, for me it really was a phase. It wasn’t women I wanted, it was Tara, and she kept it from turning into something it wasn’t supposed to be.”

“I …” Tara shook her head. “I don’t know why you’re saying this.”

“Neither do I, maybe.” Dawn took hold of her arms. “But _watch out for Willow_. Some things are different, but not everything is, so watch out for Willow.”

“She’d never hurt me,” Tara said, feeling the falseness of the words even as they left her lips.

“Wouldn’t she?” Dawn’s expression was flat and grim. “I said I didn’t have a Watcher, but there’s somebody who stays in touch, funnels me information, coordinates magical backup when I need it. She does it all by computer and phone-link: has to, because she’s in a wheelchair. Willow put her there.”

“No.” It was a whisper, hopeless and pleading.

“She was _crazy,_ Tara. She kept trying to bring Buffy back, she wouldn’t stop, she left you and she shut out Xander and she went places she never should have gone. Xander is dead now, and Jonathan, and Fred, and you’re _crippled,_ she just lost it all —”

 _“None of that happened,”_ Tara broke in. She didn’t know who Fred was or had been, but from the break in Dawn’s voice he must have been important to her. “Buffy’s alive here, Willow succeeded, and yes she’s going through some bad things but it’s nothing like that. It’s your world. It’s not mine.”

Dawn opened her mouth as if to say something else, then closed it. “I guess not,” she said after a few seconds. “Maybe you’re right. I’m sorry.”

Perhaps more would have been said, certainly there was more in the air, but just then Jonathan called from the other room. “Someone’s coming up the walk.”

Tara looked to Dawn, but no words would come to her. She turned away and went to the door.

This week Anya’s hair was a bright caramel color, and she swept inside as soon as Tara opened the door, already in full cry. “Okay, I’m here, and I didn’t tell anyone else, just like you asked. So what’s this about? You were very mysterious on the phone, I like mysteries except when they’re historically inaccurate which is almost all the time, and if we’re going to be conspirators we really ought to …” She stopped as she saw Jonathan. “What’s he doing here? Isn’t he supposed to be one of the bad guys?”

“It’s complicated,” Tara said. “We were hoping —”

“Oh, wait. You’re not trying to arrange some kind of threesome, are you? Because I’m really flattered, but that’s just not how this body is programmed. I could learn, probably, but —” She looked to Jonathan again. “Not with him. No.”

“It’s nothing like that,” Tara said. (Jonathan was still trying to recover from the shock of the word ‘threesome’.) “Do you remember saying something once about a world without shrimp?”

Anya frowned. “A what?”

“It was from a … a discussion of alternative realities. I, I can’t really get hold of the memory, but I thought you might know about things like that.”

“Oh, sure. Worked with them a couple of times. They can be tricky, though — well, obviously, I’m _here_ because one got out of control — but it’s not that uncommon in some supernatural circles. Why?”

“We kind of have a little problem here,” Jonathan began, and then stopped as Anya’s eyes fixed on something behind them. Tara followed the other woman’s gaze, and saw Buffy and Joyce momentarily stalled in the space between kitchen and hallway, doing the awkward shuffle of two people stepping into each other’s way while trying to move past one another; made further difficult, in this instance, in that each seemed determined to ignore the other. Then they hit the right timing, passed in opposite directions, and were gone from view.

“Those two,” Anya said. “Yes, you do have a problem.”

“You know them?” Jonathan said, just before Tara would have.

“Of course. I’m not about to forget _them_. They’re why I’m mortal now.”

Jonathan looked lost, and Tara said to him, “I don’t understand, either.” Then, to Anya, “How can you know who they are? You only saw them for a second. It could have been an illusion, or shape-changers, or a window into the past —”

“No, it’s them.” Anya tilted her head, listening to noises from the kitchen. “But not _just_ them, it sounds like. I think I see why you wanted me to come here by myself. Can I meet them?”

It was difficult to predict the conflicts that might spark, but Tara could think of no reason to refuse; she had called Anya for her insights and knowledge, and these would be less effective if the former demon were denied relevant information. “Try to be, well, discreet,” she said. “They’re as confused as we are, and some of them are a little … touchy.”

Only three of them were in the kitchen; the bathroom door at the end of the hall was closed, so that must be where the scarred Buffy was. “Hello,” Anya said to the ones remaining. “No need to get up, I just want to look at you for a second.”

“Who is this?” Joyce asked Tara. Cordelia was studying the newcomer with some curiosity but little actual interest; Dawn’s expression was carefully blank.

“Anya is one of the Slay Friends here,” Jonathan said, using Cordelia’s term. “She … knows stuff.”

“And you trust her not to bother this world’s Buffy with our little situation.” Joyce looked to Anya. “What do you need from us?”

“Nothing,” Anya said. “Just be quiet for a moment.” She studied the other woman, nodded, then looked to Cordelia. After a second she shrugged, moved on to Dawn. “Well. _Well._ ” Turning away from them all, she said to Tara, “So, where do you want to talk about this?”

“You don’t need to see the other one?” Jonathan asked.

Anya brushed it away. “Already did, she’s nothing new. How about outside? Can we talk outside?”

“Why can’t you discuss it here?” Joyce said, seeming annoyed rather than suspicious.

“Because you all make me uncomfortable. Well?”

“It’s after dark,” Tara reminded her. “Outside might not be the best —”

“Oh, it’s all right, the ‘Big Bad’ walked me here.” Anya made the quote marks with her fingers. “He’s watching from across the street, we’ll be perfectly safe. Don’t want him getting a look at _them,_ though. So, coming?”

< I don’t think I want him to see me, > Jonathan said in Tara’s mind.

< No, you’re right. > To Anya, “What about the bedroom? That should give us enough privacy.”

Anya made a mouth. “Oh, all right. But remember, no threesome.”

Once they were inside and the door closed, Jonathan said, “So, what did you see?”

“Nothing. I’m mortal now, I don’t have any mystical senses. I just wanted to look at them.”

“You saw _something_ ,” Tara insisted. “Somehow you recognized this Buffy and this Joyce. You even said you couldn’t be mistaken.”

“Oh, that’s different. We’re connected.” At the puzzlement visible on their faces, Anya gave a heavy sigh, and began to explain. “I lost my power center in a temporal fold. They’re from the same place. I can feel the link to it from them, so I know it has to be them.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Jonathan said. “They can’t be from the same place, each of them comes from a reality where the other is dead.”

“Not exactly. Probably the other two are from parallel timelines, but Joyce and Buffy …” Anya frowned. “I don’t know how to explain it, mortal minds don’t have the reference framework. The power of the Wish temporarily remade this reality, accessed an alternate reality and overwrote it here. But the Wish was rescinded somehow, and that branch was canceled, and this reality snapped back to what it used to be.”

Jonathan wasn’t letting go of it. “I still don’t see how they both could have come from this, this …”

“Temporal fold, like I said. I heard that something similar happened in Los Angeles a couple of years ago, but I never knew why.” It appeared that Anya considered this a personal affront. “That’s the problem with a temporal fold: by definition, it’s something that isn’t there anymore. Anyway, either Buffy or Joyce came from the first iteration; probably Joyce, because the original wish was that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale. But then I tried to reach back in, twice. Didn’t get anywhere on the first attempt, but on the second one I managed to rewrite the Wish.” She sniffed. “And wouldn’t you know it, the exact same thing happened? Somehow the Wish was overridden again, because there was just a  _blink_ and there I was, still human.”

These were things well outside Tara’s normal experience, but she found herself understanding. “The Buffy and Joyce in there are … aspects. Different faces of a, a  _possible_ time.”

“Alternative versions of a time that doesn’t exist any more,” Anya corrected. “Odd, but not really significant. And there’s nothing special about this Cordelia, she just looks like Cordelia, only more … butch. But Dawn, oh boy jiminy! Do you have any idea how rare it is to see someone from an alternate _future?_ Whoever called her here was either really skilled, or screwed up really bad.”

 _Or both,_ Tara thought, reading Jonathan’s studious lack of expression. That wasn’t a discussion for this time, however. “So, if you knew one of the four didn’t fit here, which one would you expect it to be?” _Not Dawn. Please._

Anya tilted her head to the side. “A riddle? I used to enjoy those, but it was always me posing them, ‘Answer this and you get to keep all your entrails,’ only I made sure none of those men ever got …” She stopped, frowning. “What was that?”

“Um, toilet flushing,” Tara said. “Buffy was in the bathroom, I think —”

Jonathan came to his feet. “It wasn’t just that. Does your toilet go _bump_ when it flushes?” He pulled open the bedroom door and went quickly down the hall; Tara followed him, alarm catching up to her belatedly, with Anya in her wake.

There was no one in the kitchen or the main room, but the front door was wide open. Buffy emerged from the hallway behind them, looking around with dispassionate curiosity. “Hey, where’d everybody get off to? Not that I care, but I thought we were all supposed to stay together.”

“We are.” Jonathan stepped outside, looking in all directions, hands shading his eyes from the streetlamps so he could see farther into the darkness. “I don’t spot them anywhere,” he reported. “I don’t understand it, why would they have left?”

“We can ask Spike,” Anya offered. “They couldn’t have gone out this way without him seeing them …” She trailed off, peering across the street. “Well, now _he’s_ gone, too. If that’s not just like a man —!”

And Tara knew. “Where are they?” she demanded, rounding on the alternate Buffy, sharp with urgency. “You’re a Slayer, which way would they go?”

“That way,” Buffy said, gesturing toward the street. “I can hear them down the block, sounds like they … Hey!”

Tara had taken off running the instant she had a direction. Aware of the variety of demands that could fall on any of the Slayerettes, she had privately worked on increasing her fitness; even so, her body was built for endurance, not speed, and Jonathan caught up with her in seconds, even Anya following at an interval she could track by ear. Anya, she had blithely mentioned the “Big Bad” where the others could hear her, and at least one of the Slayers must have known what that meant. That realization, that she and Anya and Jonathan were somehow associated with Spike, would have made the women unwilling to trust them. So they had waited until their hosts were out of the way, and then …

It wasn’t fear that drove her; she knew of Spike’s background, and neither his behavior nor his personality gave her any reason to like him. He was important to Buffy, though, and even more so to Dawn, _their_ Dawn. How could she ever explain it to them if harm came to him through her carelessness?

She almost passed it, she was moving in a straight line and they must have veered off at an angle; this was a stretch between streetlights, cloaked in night, and her ears were filled with the sound of her own running footsteps and harsh breathing. Movement caught a corner of her eye, however, and she pulled herself up and turned to track it. Beside her, the other Buffy appeared, she had paced them without effort.

The house was one of many caught in the vagaries of Sunnydale’s volatile real estate market: vacant for years, too valuable to raze and replace, too expensive to rent, too much out of style to attract ready buyers in a community made up more of an economically mobile population than of settled, “old” money. It was a three-story Victorian with a tower steeple and a railed porch that extended across the front and down one side; weeds grew unchecked in a huge front yard surrounded by an antique iron fence with a sagging front gate, and in a corner of the yard four figures plunged and leaped in furious motion.

It took a moment for it to resolve into a pattern, she was gasping for air and her eyes were still adjusting to the transition from indoor lighting through streetlamps into night split only by a sliver of moon, and the quickness and violence of the conflict further confounded her perceptions. Then she blinked, and the action fell into focus for her. It  _wasn’t_ all three women against Spike, she should have known the chipped vampire couldn’t have lasted a minute against a trio of Slayers; no, Dawn was helping him, battling full-throttle against a raging Cordelia while Spike was left to face the white-hot fury of Joyce.

The tableau was phenomenal, impossible, unprecedented; Tara didn’t know which way to look, recognizing without thought that she was witnessing something the likes of which had never before been seen and never would again. Cordelia and Dawn … she had heard stories of Buffy’s clashes with the dark Faith, but it hadn’t prepared her for what it must mean when two Slayers confronted one another, striking and tearing with brute muscle force many times human strength, and speed that nothing else living could equal. Yet, in a way, Spike’s match with Joyce was even more impressive, for he was clearly outclassed and yet he was still alive (well, unstaked) when he should have been scattered by the night breeze long since. He twisted, spun, rolled and whirled, the black duster whipping about him like leathery wings; he held what Tara recognized as a paling torn from the iron fence, and used it to parry, block, counterstrike, cutting the air with swings and jabs that never quite connected despite the rapidity and accuracy of their delivery. The virtuosity of it was breathtaking; for all its lethal power and focus, his every action was a defense or a feint, crafted to both compensate for and conceal his inability to launch a true, deliberate attack.

He didn’t need to breathe, she knew, and perhaps vampires didn’t tire, either, but this couldn’t last. “Help us!” she entreated the other Buffy. “You can’t let them kill him!”

The scarred girl looked to the battle in the weed-choked yard, and then back to Tara. “Why not? Take a vampire, add a Slayer, stir until dust settles. That’s the recipe, and I don’t see any reason to change it.”

Right, she should have known better even than to ask. She turned to Jonathan, and he was already reaching for her hands, and in that moment they were so unified in purpose and understanding that they might have been a team of years’ practice or even a single mind in two bodies. She felt the power surge through her as their hands clasped, almost as strong as the first time she had joined Willow, and she let it manifest the same way now, a bolt of unseen force slamming the combatants apart; while, from Jonathan, a wall of fire fountained up between the separated pairs, roaring with incandescent heat and brightness even though the weeds somehow never ignited. “Don’t!” she cried out. “Stop fighting, you can’t kill him, he … he’s one of the good guys here!”

Joyce pulled herself to her feet, and hate curdled her voice as she spoke. “That _thing_ couldn’t be good in any universe. He killed B– … my daughter, he killed Kendra, killing is what he _does_. And you’re helping him?”

The contrast with the woman she had known was so shocking that Tara found herself unable to respond. Instead she looked to Cordelia, who had come to her feet more slowly, face like flint. “Y-you know him, too?” she asked.

Cordelia’s smile would have cracked glass. “Oh, he took his time with me. Studied me, learned all about me, and then arranged a little welcome-home party for me.” Her fists clenched. “I had to stake my father in my own house. You think _that_ doesn’t traumatize a girl?”

“You don’t understand.” The words were strained from Dawn’s throat; she coughed, swallowed, and continued, “He’s not the same person, he isn’t the one you know —”

Spike had listened without speaking, looking from one of them to another, his expression a half-sneer probably assumed to conceal his confusion; but now he turned to the Goth girl standing a few feet from him, and his shock was so great that it subdued his tone to something that sounded gentle rather than simply stunned. “Bit? Wh– what’s happened to you here? And …” His gaze fixed on her wrist. “You’ve got my mark on you. Bloody hell …”

“Don’t,” Tara said, sharply enough that the vampire looked back to her, and she went on quickly. “Just go, take Anya home and then go to ground, we’ll handle it here. And, and don’t tell anybody, either one of you, please, I’ll explain it when I can.”

< Watch it, > Jonathan cautioned, but Tara had already seen Joyce take a step toward the other two; the phantom flame had faded to a low flickering line as her synergy with Jonathan ebbed, but Tara somehow didn’t think it would have made a difference. “Let them go,” she told Joyce. “If you try to go after him, we’ll have to paralyze you. I’m sorry, we really are on your side, you just d-don’t understand how things are here.”

Joyce looked straight through her, and for the first time since the discussion about Gwendolyn Post she directly addressed the alternate Buffy. “Help us,” she commanded. _“Don’t let him leave.”_

Buffy looked to one group and then the other, and folded her arms. “Forget it. I don’t like you, I don’t like them, and I don’t know what’s happening. Work it out yourselves, I’m sitting this one out.”

“Spike?” Anya called. “Can we go now? If they dust you, I’ll have to walk home without protection. I don’t think I’d look very good on a morgue shelf.”

He came out of the yard, moving like a sleepwalker, and joined Anya on the sidewalk. “I’ll explain when I have time,” Tara said again. “Just don’t say anything to Buffy or the others until then.”

Spike looked back to a woman he had seen buried and an adolescent suddenly in her twenties, wrist marked with scars he knew he had never placed there, and then over to a Buffy who didn’t seem to know him. “Wouldn’t know where to begin,” he said, and then he and Anya started off down the street together.

Jonathan was watching Joyce and Cordelia with some uneasiness, but Tara was cautiously sure that the crisis moment had passed. No combination of threats and force would have stopped them from pursuing the enemy they knew, but she had seen it in the women’s eyes: despite their resistance, they seemed to have recognized that this was in fact a different version of a hated face. She looked instead to Dawn, alone and forlorn, and had to work to overcome her own astonishment at the thought of Dawnie with Spike, _Spike_ … “What happened?” she asked. “Why didn’t you call us?”

“I didn’t know what they were going to do,” Dawn said. Her voice was still hoarse and ragged. “I heard what Anya said, but I couldn’t tell if they understood what it meant. When you went to the bedroom, though, they got up and started toward the front, like they were just tired of sitting and wanted to move around a little. So I did the same thing, nobody said anything, it was all so casual … but when they went to the door, I knew. I tried to stop them, and Mo–” She stopped. “And Joyce chopped me in the throat.”

“His mark,” Joyce said, low and even and seething with contempt. “His _mark_ on you. I knew you couldn’t be trusted, but for you to be with _him_ … vamp-loving suck-slut, traitor to humanity, you make me want to vomit.”

“Way too much imagery there,” Cordelia observed. “But, you know, I can kind of go with it. Doing the horizontal mambo with William the Bloody, that is _miles_ beyond sick.”

“Hey, can everybody just _mellow out_ a little?” Amazingly, it was Jonathan. “Look, I’m not part of the Slayer’s crew, but I keep up with their activities. They’re good people, and if they let Spike hang around, he must be okay, too. If _he’s_ so different, then why not the one Dawn knows?”

“Not _even,_ ” Cordelia began, and Joyce’s mouth twisted to spit out something even stronger, and Tara was quick enough to intervene.

“Angel,” she said.

The power of the word froze Cordelia, while Joyce was brought up short by confusion. “What?” she said.

“You love Angel,” Tara said to Cordelia. “Here, it w-was Angel and Buffy, always Buffy, there’s never been anything between our Angel and Cordelia, and there never will be. Joyce knew Angel, b-but she never met Angelus; if she had, what would she think of _you?_ ” She looked to Joyce. “In your reality, Spike k-killed Buffy. Here, they work together. It’s complicated and crazy, but it’s true. They fight side by side, they’ve s-saved each other’s lives, she trusted him to protect her mother and her sister and he _did it_  —”

“Sister?” Joyce interrupted. “Buffy has a sister here?” And then she halted; maybe a number of subliminal clues had just come together for her, or maybe Tara’s or Jonathan’s eyes had darted automatically toward Dawn as she spoke. She turned to look at the second-oldest Slayer, her face working with tangled emotions. “No. _No._ It’s impossible.”

Buffy made a show of yawning. “Is this gonna go on much longer? ’Cause I’m thinking, since we’re out anyway, maybe we could still do something about that beer.”

Joyce’s face became a mask; she looked at the brash Buffy and the stricken Dawn, and Tara could see her thought with near-telepathic certainty: _Neither one of these is my daughter._

Wait, wait just a second —

“I think she’s right,” Jonathan said. “Not about the beer, but we can’t just stand out here all night, somebody who knows Buffy — _our_ Buffy — and her family might see us and start raising questions.” To Tara he said, “Back to your place?”

“Yes,” Tara said; and then, to the others, “Will you come? We can’t m-make you, and I know all this has b-been hard and confusing, but I still think we need to stick together.”

The previous unity, however tenuous, had been fractured, and for a moment Tara was sure at least one of them would refuse. Then Cordelia said to Joyce, “Oh, come on, we might as well.” The older woman looked to her, and Cordelia gave her a thin-lipped grimace. “Let’s face it, what else is there for us to do? We still need to find a way home, and they’re our best shot, and if you come along, we can watch each other’s backs.”

“There’s that,” Joyce admitted. She closed her eyes for a few seconds. “All right.”

No one spoke on the walk back. The situation was still too delicate, their own moods too somber, and Tara took the opportunity to follow out the thought that had struck her a few minutes before. She studied each of the four Slayers in turn, using all her senses and intuition, weighing what she could see against what she knew and what might be guessed. Each in turn, but she kept coming back to two in particular. It made sense, if you looked at it in the right way; and, given what Anya had said …

She had let Jonathan lead, she taking up the rear so she could see all the others. As he passed through the front door, he was already saying, “Okay, we still have some chips and drinks left. Let’s just sit down around the table and try to figure out our next move —”

The flash dazzled Tara, its brilliance blinding her momentarily, and she instinctively reached for and loosed her deepest protective magic, augmenting it with the power still coming through the link with Jonathan. She couldn’t move, but she would have remained motionless anyway, still and quiet and safe, and as she stood waiting for her vision to clear, a new voice spoke.

“Good going, Spanky, funnel ’em straight into the target area. Did you have a good time? ’Cause we’ve got it figured out, and we’re ready to wrap this sucker up.”

Tara didn’t need any divining spells to tell her things had just gotten worse.


	4. Chapter 4

The flash had frozen them all, and Warren and Andrew quickly locked metal collars around the necks of the four Slayers. They didn’t notice Tara, of course, that was how it worked, and as the first shock faded and she found herself able to work her limbs, she slowly and quietly shifted away from the door, and stood against the wall, watching and listening.

“Ow,” Jonathan said; he must have been off-balance when the flash hit, for he was on the floor, but he had recovered enough to sit up and was slapping pins and needles from his hands. “When did you get _that_ working? You said the design wasn’t finalized yet.”

“Unlike some people,” Warren said with a smirk, “I do my best work under pressure. Okay, ladies! Sorry for the inconvenience, but we couldn’t chance you getting rambunctious when it came time to make hard choices.” He wore a pair of mirror-like shades pushed up onto his forehead; he and the wispy blond boy had apparently used those to shield themselves from the paralyzing burst of light, and Tara realized suddenly that they had copped the idea from _Men In Black_. It was all a game for them; they were children, and not especially original children. “We’ll get this done as quick as possible,” Warren was continuing, “and meanwhile you can — Whoa!”

Buffy had gone for him, faster than he could have moved to respond, but she had barely initiated the action when her body was jerked by a massive convulsion, and she went to her knees with a little grunt of pain and surprise. “Cool,” the blond boy said. “It works!”

“And against a Slayer, no less,” Warren agreed, clearly pleased with himself. “Am I hot, or what?”

“Wow,” Jonathan said. “Did the collar do that?”

“ _Oh,_ yeah,” Warren told him. “I picked up the basic concept when I hacked into a government computer network; did you know there’s a black-ops branch of the Feds that works up response scenarios for demon attacks? Their design has to be implanted, but I was able to whip up something a little more portable.” To the women he said, “Keep it under control, ladies. The collar is activated by hostile action, and keyed to us, so if you try to move against us, you’d better be ready for a monster migraine.”

“Oh, that’s just great,” Cordelia said. “So, what, we’re supposed to be your little play-toys now? You’d better be jacked into a major power grid, because if you think I’ll ever let one of you über-nerds touch me —”

Warren waved it away. “No, no, we’d never do anything like that. This is just a precautionary measure, to keep you from overreacting.” He turned to Jonathan. “So what’s with the digs, hotshot? We only had a minute to look around, but I can see this is a girl’s place. You been holding out on us?”

< Don’t tell them about me, > Tara warned.

Jonathan started, but directed his answer to Warren. “No, she’s just a friend. She, she’s already involved with somebody.” He made a gesture that took in the apartment. “We just needed to chill out a little, we’d been on the move for hours. How’d you find this place, anyway?”

“You didn’t answer when we called in, so we followed the tracker in the van.” This was the blond boy: Andrew, that was it, Andrew was the third one. “It was out front, and the door here was open, so …” He held up Jonathan’s cell phone. “You left this in the kitchen.”

“What’s happening here?” Joyce said; eyes flicking to Buffy, who was only now able to come back to her feet, she made no move toward them, but her tone was hard and challenging. “We’ve cooperated with you ever since we arrived here. Why have you made us prisoners now?”

“Like I said, just a precaution,” Warren replied, and at the same time Jonathan addressed Tara. < Are you here? I’d forgotten all about you, I don’t know why … >

< Yes, I’m here, > she answered, as Dawn said, “Precautions against what? Is there something you haven’t told us?”

“Little details here and there,” Warren acknowledged smugly. < Don’t tell them I asked you for help, > Jonathan begged. < We, we can still work something out here. >, and Warren went on, “Like, for instance, one of you isn’t supposed to be here; and, oh yeah, we’re gonna have to kill you to save the world.”

“Excuse me.” Cordelia raised her hand. “When you say ‘you’, does that mean you _her,_ or you _us?_ ” She looked around. “What? It’s a perfectly legitimate question.”

“Rest easy, Princess.” Warren pointed at Dawn. “She’s the lucky winner. Took some time to narrow it down, but her energy signature is light-years away from anybody else’s, plus there’s the whole back-from-the-future deal.” To Dawn he said, “Nothing personal, sweetheart, but it’s either you or … well, everybody else in every other reality _plus_ you. Good news is, I think I’ve worked out a way to do it that probably won’t hurt too much.”

“No,” Joyce said, while Tara said, < Stop him, Jonathan. Don’t let him do this. > “We came here together,” Joyce continued. “We’ve fought, together and against each other. We’re all Slayers, which means we were all chosen by something bigger than you. You don’t get to just pick out one of us and kill her. We won’t let that happen.”

< What am I supposed to do? > Jonathan asked plaintively, and Warren said, “Well, see, this is where contingency planning pays off.” He held up something like a TV remote; no, it  _was_ a TV remote, though part of the casing was gone and extra components bulged from the circuit board. “You don’t ‘let’ us do anything. Move against us, you get zapped automatically. Try to resist, or run, I trigger it with this. Now, if you don’t mind …”

“I don’t believe this,” Dawn said; her face was slack with seeming shock, and Warren leveled the controller at her as her voice rose. “You bring us here, you make us jump through hoops all night, and now you tell me I have to die? That’s, that’s …” She shook her head as if words would no longer serve, and then wheeled to confront Cordelia. “And you, _you_. You’re fine with them killing me as long as it doesn’t mar _your_ precious skin!”

“Hey, I just wanted to know,” Cordelia protested. “I didn’t mean —”

Dawn leaped at her with a wordless shout, and both women went tumbling over the couch. Everyone else was too surprised to react, Trio and Slayers alike; Jonathan and Andrew watched open-mouthed, and Warren’s lips settled into a smile as the two Slayers clawed and pummeled at each other. For the second time in minutes, Tara found herself paralyzed, this time with indecision: what could she do, how could she stop this?

There was no way to intervene in the fight without revealing her presence, and that was an advantage they might need. Unwelcome and potentially disastrous though it might be, the clash between the two women was of secondary importance, and Tara chose accordingly. She made herself move, let herself drift, soft and silent as a shadow, to where Warren stood. She could never have done this alone, walking unseen through a group of people was an entire order of magnitude more difficult than just hanging back unnoticed, and she prayed that the link with Jonathan would be enough to maintain it. All right, she was beside Warren now, she could snatch the controller from him before he realized she was there, smash it with a hard throw against the wall; the women still wouldn’t be able to act against him directly, but he could no longer threaten them by remote control —

On the other side of the room, Dawn broke free of Cordelia’s grip and drove the second Slayer to her knees with a clubbing fist. Before she could follow up, Joyce was on her, pulling her back and away from the fallen Cordelia. Dawn spun and went for the older woman, her hands closing on Joyce’s throat … but hooked instead inside the metal collar, and with a terrific outward wrench of her shoulders she tore the imprisoning circle apart.

Just that quickly, the action stopped. Dawn’s fury, so wildly out of control moments before, fell away on the instant; she stepped back, letting her hands drop to her sides. Joyce regarded her with an unfathomable expression, and then she turned to Warren. “I think you want to put that thing away,” she said.

Warren retreated automatically, but he still held the controller directed toward the three other Slayers. “Whoa, whoa, hold it right there.” His hand and his voice shook as he struggled for confidence. “Stay where you are, or I’ll key an overload and fry their brains.”

Joyce didn’t even glance back at the others. “I think Slayers are tougher than you realize. I think if I go for you now, you’ll be broken before I find out whether I’m wrong.”

Dawn stepped up to stand beside the older woman. “Take the collars off the others,” she told Warren. “I’ll do whatever you say. I knew it might come to this, I’m ready for whatever has to be done. But let them go, right now, or —”

“Oh, get _real,_ ” Buffy said, and pulled apart Cordelia’s collar; a moment later, Cordelia had returned the favor, and together they moved up to join their fellow Slayers. “You know,” Buffy observed, “I think these guys need a good spanking. Like, with a brick.”

“No,” Dawn said. She looked to the three women beside her. “I meant what I said. The end of, of _everything_ … I won’t be the cause of that.” To Warren she said, “Tell me what I need to do.”

Joyce put a hand on her shoulder. “I won’t let you —”

“It’s _my choice,_ ” Dawn insisted. “Maybe it’s even my destiny, because this is the second time for me. Buffy …” She stopped, swallowed. “Buffy took it in my place, last time, but now I’m the older sister. It’s my choice.”

“Good girl!” Warren interjected, breaking in ahead of further argument. “I swear to you all, I never would have pulled the rough stuff if I’d known I could count on her to understand the program.” He snapped his fingers. “Jonathan, Andrew, help me set up the relays, we’ll do this just like at the Lair, then I’ll adjust for desequencing —”

No. <  _Stop him,_  > Tara commanded mentally. < He’s wrong, tell him he’s wrong! >, and, “Wait,” Jonathan said. “I, I think you’re wrong.”

Warren rounded on him. “What’s your problem, Dweezil? You _want_ to see our world turned into dimensional Spam? This isn’t something you can fix by stroking your magic bone, we are talking quantum-level disruptions here. So fall into line like a good little munchkin and _do what you’re told._ ”

Jonathan’s face was a changing canvas of doubt, fear, uncertainty. < I know what I’m talking about, > Tara insisted. < Just say what I tell you. It’s not Dawn. Say that. >

“It’s not Dawn,” Jonathan repeated like a robot.

“You’re out of your depth here, Frodo.” Warren was getting angry now. “Why don’t you just stick to things you understand —”

“Let him talk,” Joyce ordered.

“Listen to what I have to say,” Jonathan said, obedient to instructions from Tara. “Just hear me out first. It isn’t Dawn. I’m not guessing here, I know what I’m talking about. I can see auras. Not, not all the time —” The last was his own words, he was starting to think as well as repeat the lines he was being fed. “— but it’s really clear on these four. For the last half an hour, Buffy’s and Mrs. Summers’ auras have been changing, moving closer together, shifting to match each other. It’s not Dawn. It’s them. They’re supposed to be together. They got split, but they’re supposed to be together. We didn’t call up three and get an extra one shoved in. We called three, and had one of them separate into two. That’s what happened. And, and we don’t have to null anybody out to fix it. We need to put the two of them back together. Send them back, together. That’s what we have to do.”

A long silence greeted the end of this remarkable recitation. Tara ignored Andrew; Warren, Warren was the deciding voice here, and she couldn’t read what was going on behind those eyes. Once again she debated whether she should make herself known. She needed for him to willingly carry out the process of sending the four Slayers back to their realities of origin, and his reaction if she abruptly ‘appeared’ in front of him …

“Auras, huh?” Warren studied Jonathan with interest. “You’re just full of surprises. And you say, what, Buffy and her mother are supposed to be one person? That doesn’t make a lot of sense. You sure you don’t just have the hots for Future Girl?”

“Not the same person, I didn’t mean that.” Jonathan was becoming more assured now, needing only the occasional prompt from Tara. “But they’re from the same _time,_ only that time got snarled, looped around … overdubbed. It’s what they call a temporal fold, different layers written over each other. Mrs. Summers is the Slayer in one layer, mirror-Buffy in the other. We reached in and pulled out, like, a cross-section, and the layers separated and gave us two people.”

“This is no time for playing a hunch,” Warren warned. “We’ve got all the marbles on this one, we’re carrying the fate of _universes_ here. Are you absolutely positive?”

“It’s not a guess,” Jonathan replied firmly. “I can _see_ them. Buffy and Mrs. Summers are supposed to go back to the same time. That’s how it is.”

There was more to it than that, of course. The similarity between the threatened melding of dimensions and the catastrophe averted by Buffy’s self-sacrifice the year before was too much to be a coincidence; it had to be tied to Dawn, maybe no single universe could ever contain two Keys. Even if her presence had caused the stress and direction of the threat, though, reuniting Joyce and Buffy was the cornerstone that would allow the balances to be reestablished.

Jonathan must have sounded convincing, because the scarred Buffy was regarding the stranger with her mother’s face, doubt and perplexity shadowing her own expression. “Me … and her?” she said.

“The two of us,” Joyce said, speaking as if her lips were numb; then, to Jonathan, “Are you sure?”

“Staking my life on it here,” Jonathan said. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

The two Slayers stared at one another, and Dawn spoke from behind them, echoing Jonathan’s words. “You belong together, you always have. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

There was a long silence. Something was happening here, all of them could feel it, and no one seemed willing to break the spell. “I couldn’t … even remember what you looked like, until I saw you here,” Buffy said at last.

“I held you when you died,” Joyce said in reply. “Your blood was all over me. I was screaming.”

Buffy shook her head. “It wasn’t me.”

“It was,” Jonathan said. Tara was sending to him again, and they explained it together. “You’re both from the same time, except that time got screwed up by some demon curse. It isn’t even a parallel timeline, like Cordelia and Dawn come from; it’s a shunt, a dead end, for both of you it goes just so far and then _stops._ ” He paused. “No, not for both of you: for each of you. You got split apart, and I think … I think, if you go back together, you can make it right again. Set your time back on track, start all over again. Together.”

They looked to one another, mother and daughter, two people who had hurt too much even to hope, pushing each other away because they had seen dreams shatter. “He _thinks_ we can set things right by going back together,” Buffy said.

“Yes.” Joyce nodded. “There are no guarantees. We could wind up right back at the same … dead end. Or wink out into nothing. Oblivion.” She stopped, drew a breath. “I don’t care.”

Buffy let it hang for a heartbeat. Then: “Me, either.” She turned to Warren. “So what do we have to do?”

*                    *                    *

While the equipment was being set up for reverse transport, Tara found a moment to again join hands with Jonathan, and together they wove what she needed. Then she moved softly about the apartment, touching each of the Slayers in turn, extending the link to cover them, cautioning them not to reveal her presence. She had no wish to deal with the other members of the Trio — even if they couldn’t hurt her, with everyone else set against them, it was a complication to be avoided if at all possible — but was equally unwilling to let the women depart without a farewell. Connected in a way that excluded the men (even Jonathan chose to withdraw), they could speak briefly to people they would never see again.

If Warren and Andrew saw anything odd in the sustained silence of the four women, they didn’t remark on it. As Anya would have said, _That’s men for you._

< I’m sorry I helped him deceive you, > she told them all. < I tried to keep it from getting out of hand, but … I had to protect him, as well as help you. I hope you can understand. >

< I’m okay, > Dawn said. < I never really trusted Warren anyhow, I remember hearing that creepy story about April. No harm. >

< It was you, wasn’t it? > Joyce asked. < When Jonathan was explaining about shunts and layers, you were talking through him. >

< It took me till then to realize the truth, > Tara admitted. < And I deal better with Warren when I … don’t deal with him. >

< You gave me my daughter back, > Joyce said. < I won’t begrudge your methods. >

< Same here, > Buffy said. < You want to keep secrets, your biz. But I really am a little pissed about no beer. >

It wouldn’t have occurred to Tara that a mental voice could incorporate a snarl, but Cordelia managed it. < So, break out the marshmallows and everybody sing ‘Kumbayah’. > Her lips held a practiced pout. < I don’t like being lied to, people. What if the Geek Patrol had decided _I_ was the oddball, just because I never dipped my toes in the Summers gene pool? I could have been wiped from existence and never known it was coming.  >

< I’m sorry, > Tara told her again. < I wouldn’t have let that happen. >

Cordelia sniffed. < Well, color me confident. >

“Almost ready, ladies,” Warren announced. “If you have any goodbyes, say ’em quick.”

“I think we’re covered there,” Dawn said.

< Will you be all right? > Tara asked her. < You’ve lost so much … I wish we could have talked more. >

< You did enough, > Dawn replied. < Let me act out some of my suicidal tendencies, and then stopped Warren from blanking me. I’ll deal. >

Tara had thought she had narrowed the link to just the two of them, but perhaps not; Joyce caught Dawn’s eye and asked, < You and — > Even mentally, she couldn’t seem to give him a name; she shook her head and started again. < Does he … love you? >

< He loves Buffy. > Dawn made a sad smile. < Nearly ten years, and he’s still mourning her. But he’ll never leave me, just because he promised her he’d look after me. >

It was hard for the older woman. Tara could see the struggle within her. But she made herself meet the eyes of the grown daughter she had never known, and said, < Take care of yourself. >

Time had run out. The Trio had finished laying out the transport schematic, a latticework of improvised mechanical components within the lines of a pentagram. Three circles had been established there, bordered with copper wire and colored chalks — < I’ll come back later and help you vacuum that up, > Jonathan projected apologetically — and the women took their place within them: Dawn in one circle, Cordelia in the second, and Joyce and Buffy in the last one, squeezing tightly together to stay within the borders, their arms around one another.

“Showtime!” Warren called. “T minus twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen —”

< Cordelia! > Tara called abruptly; why hadn’t she thought of this before? < In this reality, they found a way to give Angel back his soul. There’s a ritual — > She explained as quickly as she could, everything she could remember from Willow’s story of her first manifestation of mystical ability, rushing to beat the countdown.

< Computer disk, got you, > Cordelia shot back. < Okay, I’ll have Willow look for it. Thanks — >

It was done. They were gone.

*                    *                    *

Even though he couldn’t see her, Jonathan was pretty sure Tara was still there — it was her apartment, after all — so as he helped his friends disassemble and pack the reverse transit mechanism, he called cautiously, < What are you going to tell Anya and Spike? >

< The truth, > she answered immediately. Yes, she was there. < Lies hurt people. But … I think I’ll try to persuade them to keep it a secret from everyone else. Things are so hard for Buffy right now … it’s just not a good idea. I’ll tell her eventually, when I think she’s ready to handle something like that. >

That was a relief: one more thing he wouldn’t have to face, at least not right away. < Okay, then, > he told her. And then: < Thanks again for helping me. I owe you, big time. >

< I told you already, I did it for Buffy, and for _them_. But … I’m glad you asked me.  > She was quiet — well, non-communicating — for several seconds, and then she said, < Jonathan, I don’t think you belong with the Trio. >

< What are you talking about? > He kept packing, and focused on keeping his expression neutral. < I’m a founding member. We swore an oath. >

< Something Dawn said to me, just before Anya got here … I think you were with the Slayerettes, back in her reality. I think that was supposed to be your destiny here, but you got … sidetracked. >

Jonathan remembered the rib-creaking hug Dawn had given him, back at the vampire tenement, and felt a fluttering of doubt. < They’re my friends, Tara. What kind of person would I be if I ran out on them? >

Her reply was some time in coming; even without the stutter, she seemed hesitant in choosing her words. < They’re not good for you. I don’t really know anything about Andrew, he seems harmless, but Warren … there’s something wrong with him, Jonathan. He was ready to kill Buffy, back when she was invisible. Maybe he hadn’t really thought through what that would mean … He’s a big kid, it’s like he thinks he’s the, the dungeon master in some role-playing game. What if someone gets hurt before he realizes how serious this all is? What if it’s you? >

Reproach would have been easier to resist than the genuine concern that emanated from her. Part of him wanted to agree to her plea, but there was no escaping the answer. < They’re my friends. I won’t desert them. >

It wouldn’t be necessary for him to return; Warren didn’t want to leave any trace of their activities, and Jonathan and Andrew brushed and vacuumed the carpet under his direction. Tara’s thoughts came to him again. < Friends or not, they’re wrong for you. They’ve started down a bad road, and you’re about to follow them. That’s not how it should be. These super-villain fantasies … I think you’re supposed to be with us, Jonathan. >

Yearning flooded through him at the thought, but he pushed it away. He had made a commitment, and he would honor it. < I’m sorry, > he said. < But … can we still, you know, talk sometimes? Like we are now? >

< No. > He could feel regret from her, but no uncertainty. < I have loyalties, too … and, I’m sorry, you can’t have it both ways. As soon as you leave, I’ll close the link. It’s, it’s too personal, for people who are on opposite sides. >

< Oh. > He felt his face stiffen, and was surprised at the keenness of the disappointment.

< But … you can call me, on the telephone, if you ever want to change your mind. If you ever need help, getting out. > There was another pause, and she went on just before he would have answered. < I know how you feel about your friends. I’m sure you’re making a mistake, but I understand. If you can ever get past where you are now … I’ll be here to help you. It’s important that you believe that. >

They were finished, and Warren was hustling them out the door. < I believe it, > Jonathan said. < I’ll remember. > And then, knowing that it was about to end, he sent his final message. < Thanks for all you’ve done. It, it meant a lot to me. >

< Goodbye, > she said as Andrew pulled the door closed behind them. And then the link was broken, and he was alone.

Warren was characteristically hyper during the drive back to the Lair (they’d come to Tara’s apartment on bicycles, carrying the equipment in aluminum-frame rucksacks; it was all stowed in the back of the van now), and Andrew played along happily with the exuberance of the more dominant personality. Jonathan didn’t take part in any of the byplay; he felt sad, and wondered if he had made the right choice, even though he couldn’t have done otherwise.

Maybe Tara was right. Maybe it was all just a game to them. Jonathan had been shut out too many times to be willing to do it to someone else, but …

No, no buts. They’d do this until it wasn’t fun any more, and then they’d let it drop. These things never lasted forever. A natural end would come, sooner or later, and then …

Then, maybe he would give Tara that call. Jonathan Levinson, one of the Slayerettes; it had a nice feel to it.

Relieved and cheered by his unvoiced decision, Jonathan allowed himself to pay attention to what the others were saying. And just in time, it seemed: Warren was asking, “So, boys and girls, what have we learned tonight?”

Jonathan thought about it. “Don’t try to date Slayers?”

Andrew was more optimistic. “We should build our own dream girl, like the guys in _Weird Science_?”

“No, no.” Warren shook his head with authority. “Supernatural females, off limits. There are just too many factors we can’t control. No, we need to focus on regular girls … but find a way to make them _want_ us.”

Andrew seemed to vibrate between awe and dread at the concept. “Can we do that?” he whispered.

Warren laughed. “Bunch of evil geniuses like us? Piece of cake. I already have some ideas; iron out a few wrinkles, and trust me, we’ll be wall-to-wall with buxom blondes in no time at all.”

Okay, then! Jonathan congratulated himself on sticking with the program. What if he’d weakened, and left the Trio just before Warren had his brainstorm? Disaster. No, this one was too good to miss.

He did note that Warren, in his excitement, had taken the wrong road. It didn’t matter. One way or another, they would all get where they were going.

   
end


End file.
